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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: In 1961 I went to work with National Geographic, and my first assignment was a story on the migration of the Monarch butterflies. I was from Virginia and although I saw monarchs in my mother's gardens I was completely unprepared for what I learned when I did the research for this article and saw the pictures the photographers brought back. These migrations involving millions of butterflies have been going on for thousands of years, mostly down the West Coast of the United States.
Now 60 years later humans in their stupidity and uninterest in learning how the great matrix of life operates are on the verge of destroying this ancient cycle of life.
SAN FRANCISCO — The number of western monarch butterflies wintering along the California coast has plummeted precipitously to a record low, putting the orange-and-black insects closer to extinction, researchers announced Tuesday.
An annual winter count by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Marin County to San Diego County in the south in the 1980s.
Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster to keep warm. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.
On the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, another monarch population travels from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of miles to spend the winter in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the monarch population in the eastern U.S. has fallen about 80% since the mid-1990s, but the drop-off in the […]
Stephan: Here is some good news. I hope this is just the beginning.
The Sherburne County (Sherco) Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant owned by Xcel Energy and located in Becker, Minnesota, shown in 2016. Credit: Tony Webster/Flickr
Climate campaigners welcomed a federal court’s decision Tuesday to strike down the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy rule—dubbed by its critics the “Dirty Power” rule—which loosened restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants.
“A failure by Trump is a major win for the planet,” said Clare Lakewood, legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “The court has wisely struck down another effort by this administration to shred environmental protections in service of polluters.”
Finalized in 2019 and signed by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule was a replacement to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. ACE was met with fierce outrage and lawsuits from environmental groups and dozens of states and cities who said it was an industry-friendly rule that rejected science to the detriment of public health and the climate crisis.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Stephan: I woke up very early this morning to see Trump depart, and Biden and Harris be inaugurated, and when it was over I felt an existential shift had taken place. My country was awakening from a long and debilitating illness and light was suddenly streaming through the window looking out into our future. Integrity, compassion, science, and fact-based governance have returned to the United States government.
Before evening had come Joe Biden has reinstated America in the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accord, and ended the virulent and nasty racism of Trump's immigration and internal policies. Particularly, Biden directed that the mothers and fathers who had been separated from their children must be reunited with them.
Biden has set the tone, and now each of us, no matter who we are, where we are, regardless of our race, gender, income, or education, has been called to resonate with that tone and do everything we can in every decision we make each day through those choices to foster wellbeing in our society.
I am an experimentalist, a historian, and a futurist, and for over half a century I have studied the nature of consciousness and how it operates in both individuals and societies. The main thing those decades of research have taught me is that all life is interconnected and interdependent and that when fostering wellbeing is the priority all the beings of the earth do better, feel better, are happier, and safer.
Stephan: In 14 hours the cancer of Donald Trump will be gone, and America will be led by competent adults again, and Joe Biden is already starting out on the right foot by rescinding or abolishing everything Trump the Disgusting has done over the past four years. I don't know about you, but I feel like I am recovering from a long and debilitating illness.
A family from Honduras in El Florido, Guatemala, on Monday stopped before seeking asylum in the United States after a caravan of migrants clashed with the police. Credit: Getty
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will propose far-reaching legislation on Wednesday to give the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States a chance to become citizens in as little as eight years, part of an ambitious and politically perilous attempt to undo the effects of President Trump’s four-year assault on immigration.
Under the proposal that Mr. Biden will send to Congress on his first day in office, current recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as “Dreamers,” and others in temporary programs that were set up to shield some undocumented immigrants from deportation would be allowed to immediately apply for permanent legal residency, according to transition officials who were briefed on Mr. Biden’s plan.
The legislation would also restore and expand programs for refugees and asylum seekers after efforts by Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller, the […]
Michele L. Norris, Columnist - The Washington Post
Stephan: I think Michele Norris is absolutely right. What happens from here on is completely dependent on us, each of us. The Trumpers are about 25 percent of the country. They are not the majority, and they are not going to define America. Not if I have anything to say about it. How about you?
The Bidens, competent, caring, ethical adults.
“Fragile” is not a word we normally associate with America.
But fragile is where we are as we wake up on Inauguration Day.
Fragile like an egg: our economy, our sense of security, our national psyche.
Fragile like a trigger: insurrection fueled by anger and delusion. A pandemic spreading out of control.
Can we now admit that our presidents are fragile, too? The puffy brat with an ego made of glass who craved constant adulation and ignored the call to presidential duty is now headed to his new home. He leaves in his trail a terrifying reminder that when power itself becomes the goal, it ceases to function as a means for governance.
Now he is replaced by a statesman, who has developed a kind of inner fortitude from publicly navigating the fragility in his own life. He brings that experience onstage Wednesday morning — the humility that accompanies uncertainty, the empathy born of loss, the special balance one gains after stumbling in his own life and finding the resilience to stagger forward.
Stephan: The Trumps are so vulgar, and so lacking in courtesy that for the first time in 150 years a president and his family have chosen to leave office by slinking away like thieves in the night. I think the Bidens were just fine with that. Why should they be interested in even shaking hands with a man who has done so much harm to the country? I thought that when I heard how Trump was leaving, and Biden's daughter Ashley confirms it.
Ashley Biden and her father
President-elect Joe Biden‘s daughter, Ashley Biden, did her first network television interview with another member of the small club of presidential children, Jenna Bush Hager of NBC.In an interview that aired Tuesday, Ashley Biden said her mother, incoming first lady Jill Biden, has not heard from first lady Melania Trump about any kind of traditional handoff at the White House, as is custom on Inauguration Day.”I don’t think they’re doing the traditional protocol, which is unfortunate, but I think we’re all OK with it,” Ashley Biden said.
Ashley Biden, a private person who does not have any public social media accounts, said she will not have a job in her father’s administration, unlike Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter.But she will use her platform “to advocate for social justice, for mental health, to be involved in community development and revitalization,” she said.
She reflected on the attacks that were leveled against her family during the presidential campaign and said, “The cruelty and the meanness, that’s why I’m not, I […]
Stephan: The research reported on in this study is essential to understanding the Trumper mind, and how it is these people live in a fact-free world.
To access the academic study upon which this report is based: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12706
White House photo of Donald Trump and staff in the Oval Office. From left, Kellyanne Conway, Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Dan Scavino, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Mercedes Schlapp
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” a quip that implies that empirical data is more important than anecdotal evidence. Yet a recent psychological study suggests that conservatives, not liberals, are far more apt to let their feelings to get in the way of accepting facts.
In a paper published in the journal Political Psychology in October, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College describe a pair of studies that they conducted to determine if there is a connection between a person’s political ideology and their willingness to accept scientific and non-scientific views on non-political subjects. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. They allowed the surveyed individuals to either rate one higher than the other, or argue that “both sides” were equal.
Stephan: I think it is very important that each of us who support democracy, racial and gender equality, and social policies that foster wellbeing at every level bear in mind that something fundamental has happened with one of the political parties in the United States. The Republican Party has become an organization of White supremacy and fascism. The polls make this very clear.
]Why has this happened? In my opinion, it is happening because Whites, and largely White men, are terrified that as America becomes a majority-minority nation Whites are losing the unspoken privilege that their race conferred. Equally alarming to these generally low education, low intellect Whites, the nation's implicit gender bias is also unraveling, and men will no longer enjoy a superior status over women.
What is clear is that even as Trump slithers out of the presidency the party he has enabled and allowed to blossom into the hate group it has become will remain. Contrary to all the happy lies we will tell ourselves, and teach our children in school, racism, authoritarianism, and male dominance have been baked into the culture of the United States since the nation came into existence in 1787. Don't you think it is time to change this, and who can do that, but we ourselves?
Trump and his racist christofascist enablers
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is the only president in history to be impeached twice — this time for his role in encouraging a deadly assault on the Capitol by his supporters — but he is poised to leave office with a job approval rating that is fairly typical of his entire time in office.
A new NBC News poll found that 43 percent of voters nationwide gave Trump a positive job approval rating, just barely down from 45 percent who said the same before the November election and the 44 percent who approved of his performance shortly after he took office in 2017.
The same poll found that 35 percent of voters — including 74 percent of Republicans but just 30 percent of independents and 3 percent of Democrats — believe President-elect Joe Biden did not win the election legitimately.
Sixty-one percent of all voters — but just 21 percent of Republicans — say Biden did win legitimately.
