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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: You may already know about this lawsuit, and the one by the other voting machine company Smartmatic. I think they represent a very interesting and positive trend, that is going to strongly affect our future. In my oinion it is really going to test the Trumpian biased judiciary. This report describes the latest in the Dominion lawsuit. It is obvious that Fox, and its propaganda spreaders are guilty. The facts are indisputable; they were witnessed by millions. Getting big numbers and the influence it confers was why Fox has acted as they have. I believe this will go to the Supreme Court, and their response will be very revealing.
Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
Dominion Voting Systems, filed a hefty $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News on Friday morning over the cable network’s repeated airing of half-baked conspiracy theories about Dominion somehow “rigging” the 2020 election.
In the 139-page complaint, with hundreds of additional pages of exhibits, various current and former Fox News or Fox Business hosts are cited for floating false election fraud claims, including Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, and Maria Bartiromo. Dominion argues that by airing and entertaining such conspiracies, the network “recklessly disregarded the truth,” which the technology company says was “good for Fox’s business.”
One key passage in the massive lawsuit document summarizes the case:
Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire. As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved. With Fox’s global platform, an audience of hundreds of millions, and the inevitable and extensive republication and dissemination of the falsehoods through social […]
Stephan: The pandemic, the economic collapse, the job loss, the racism and gender issues have stressed Americans to a degree unexperienced since perhaps the Second World War. And that mental and emotional stress coupled with America's gun psychosis has led to this.
Pandemic-induced fear, economic hardship, domestic discord, racial strife and an influx of guns helped propel the urban homicide rate by a record amount last year, a new report says.
Why it matters: A drumbeat of dire reports about rising crime has left city dwellers justifiably scared — and policy makers should be addressing the pandemic and violent crime at the same time, the report’s authors say.
Anti-violence programs should be a priority, according to the report released by Arnold Ventures — a philanthropy focused on solving societal problems — and the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice.
Relations between communities and the police should be mended, the authors say,and street outreach workers should be deployed to help defuse tensions.
Driving the news: “In a sample of 34 cities, homicide rates were almost 30% higher in 2020 than in 2019, a jump that claimed an additional 1,268 lives,” per the report.
Prior to 2020, the biggest single-year increase in the murder rate was 12.7%, in 1968, the report said.
While the three largest cities — New York, L.A. and Chicago — […]
Stephan: For decades, in every way I can, I have been making the case for what I have called Schwartz' Principle of Wellbeing. It states: social policies that foster wellbeing are always more efficient, more productive, easier to implement, longer-lasting, nicer to live under, and much much cheaper than the alternatives. Here is yet another calculation of the Principle. So why aren't we doing this? First, because a small group wants to protect their investment in a less wellbeing fostering alternative. Then there is ignorance and sloth.
Climate models show time is running out for the world to cut emissions and avert catastrophic climate change, but a new report finds that taking the required action will actually boost economic growth and create jobs.
“Transforming the economy requires us to build and deploy A LOT of new stuff,” Robbie Orvis, author of the report, explained by email. “As a result, we see a large increase in output from U.S. industries and the associated increased value-added and GDP benefits that come with that.”
Meeting the Paris targets would require rapidly transforming every sector of the economy to run on clean technologies instead of fossil fuels. Orvis, director of energy policy design at the nonpartisan energy and environmental policy firm Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, estimates that accomplishment would generate about 3.1 million full-time jobs by 2035 and 5.5 million by 2050 as workers find new jobs with manufacturers and with developers of clean energy technologies or associated industries like computer chip manufacturing, silicon mining, and steel production. Those new workers would spend their income on food and other […]
Stephan: You can tell the quality of a culture, a society, by the way it treats its young and its elderly. History over thousands of years makes that clear. The United States scores very badly in both categories. The good news, as this story, describes is that Biden, Harris, and their administration seem to be genuinely committed to fostering wellbeing in important ways. The bad news is the Republicans are doing everything in their power to block this, and the pandemic has made the task monumental.
Family day care provider Deborah Corley Marzett.
Deborah Corley Marzett hasn’t missed a day of work since the pandemic started.
When supplies like toilet paper and paper towels were scarce, the family child care provider was up before dawn to stand in line at the store. When schools were closed and older children started to come to her for remote learning, she bought new tables and upgraded her internet so they could Zoom into their lessons. When Covid-19 brought new ventilation requirements, she enclosed her porch to build a safe place with plenty of airflow where kids could play.
But none of this came cheap. The internet alone costs $100 a month, Marzett told Vox. And getting financial help has been a constant struggle. When she went to apply for a PPP loan, just getting information from the bank was difficult. She did eventually receive a small business loan, but she’s afraid to touch the money: “I can’t afford to pay that loan back,” she said.
For in-home providers like her, “for every dime we make, it goes into supporting our […]
Stephan: Do you ever wonder why the Red value states seem so dysfunctional, and their social outcome data is always at the bottom of any rating? It is because Republican governance never has fostering wellbeing as their first priority. There is always something else more important to the people and governments of Red value states. Here is yet another proof that Red State governance is always inferior.
Credit: Neil Nakahodo/The Kansas City Star
JEFFERSON CITY, MISSOURI – Republican lawmakers blocked Medicaid expansion funding from reaching the Missouri House floor on Thursday, posing a setback for the voter-approved plan to increase eligibility for the state health care program.
The House Budget Committee voted along party lines not to pass a bill allowing Missouri to spend $130 million in state funds and $1.6 billion in federal money to pay for the program’s expansion. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government picks up 90% of the tab on expanding Medicaid.
The increased eligibility would allow an estimated 230,000 additional low-income Missourians to be covered. It is set to go into effect in July, after voters approved a ballot question last August with a 53% majority.
Democrats slammed the vote as an attempt to subvert Missourians’ wishes to implement the expansion, which several Republicans said was unpopular in their own districts.
Democrats plan to re-introduce the funds into the rest of the state budget on the House floor. Budget Chair Cody Smith, a Carthage Republican, said he will introduce another […]
Stephan: Here is the winner of today's Republican scum award. Jason Miller, to me, has always been a hired gun of American fascism. But this story is really a bridge too far; trying to stiff his ex-wife by faking poverty, as this report describes. There are so many of these stories about Trumpers that I think that in itself should be seen as notable and increasingly definitive of Trump and his administration.
Jason Miller, middle, at Trump’s second impeachment trial in February. Credit: Erin Scott/Reuters
A top aide to Donald Trump was secretly re-engagedby a leading political strategy firm after being forced to step down after a social media scandal, the Guardian can reveal.The company, Washington-based Teneo, wanted access to top Republicans in the then president’s inner circle, and to conceal his ongoing work.
Jason Miller – who remains close to Trump, and who today serves as a senior adviser to the former president – also later appears to have misled a Florida court about this employment status, asserting in a sworn statement that he could no longer comply with a court order requiring him to pay child-support payments because of an alleged “major financial setback” and was effectively out of work.
Miller resigned as a managing editor of Teneo, the powerhouse corporate advisory firm, on 21 June 2019, after posting a series of obscenity-laced tweets about the Democratic congressman Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House judiciary committee.
“I have parted ways with Teneo by mutual consent and look forward to … my next […]
Daniel Victor and Jenny Gross, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: In 2018, in the United States nearly 40,000 men, women, and children died from gun violence; it is a number so large that it is orders of magnitude greater than all the nations of Europe COMBINED. And not one of those countries trains its children on how to behave when a mass murderer with an assault rifle storms into their school and starts shooting. America's gun psychosis has reached a level where we have more guns than people in the country, and mass murders are commonplace, as this article lays out. In my view, this is social insanity.
A gunman opened fire at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., on Monday, killing 10 people, including a police officer. Credit: Michael Ciaglo/USA Today Network/Reuters
The bleak reality of a list like this is that it leaves out so many more.
There have been dozens of mass shootings in the United States in just the past five years, according to the Violence Project, which maintains a database of attacks in which at least four people were killed.
Each new attack is a reminder of all of the others that came before it, as the nation has been unable to curb an epidemic of gun violence that far outpaces other countries. These are just some of the horrors that have traumatized the nation.
March 22, 2021: A grocery store in Boulder, Colo.
A gunman inside a grocery store killed 10 people, including Eric Talley, the first police officer to arrive at the scene. […]
Sallyann Nicholls , Alice Tidey, Emma Beswick, - euronews
Stephan: The numbers cited are based on 2019 data but its substantive points remain the same. It illustrates the insanity of the American gun psychosis and shows the blazing contrast between all of Europe compared to the United States. The U.S. has 4.23% of the world's population, yet we own almost half the civilian-owned firearms in the world.
Gun ownership per capita in the US is more than three times that of Europe’s highest country.
There were 39.1 firearms per 100 people in Montenegro, compared with 120 in the US, according to the Small Arms Survey (SAS)
Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.
The SAS found that gun ownership among civilians (84.6%) dwarfed state militaries (13.1%) and law enforcements’ (2.2%) stockpiles, and that number had grown by more than 200 million since 2006.
In total, it is thought that there are more than 1 billion firearms in possession across 230 countries and autonomous territories around the world.
Europe
The European Union’s 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017. That figure grows to 93.2 million when including countries outside the EU, like Russia and Iceland.
The most guns were concentrated in Russia (17.6m), Germany (15.8m) and France (12.7m), while the rate of firearms owned per 100 people was highest in Montenegro (39.1), Serbia (39.1) and Cyprus (34). In comparison, […]
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