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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: Lauren Boebert is a Republican Congresswoman, and I don't see any difference between her and a sniper spotter. I think she should be arrested as an accessory to the attempted murder of the Speaker of the House. I am sick and tired of the Republican anti-democratic insurrection enablers. There needs to be accountability and this party has to decide whether personal power or country is their first priority. So far it is pretty clear they choose power. Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks, Mitch McConnell, the whole lot of them need to be thrown out of the Congress. They have no honor. They have no ethics except for their own personal advancement.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week.
Boebert shared the tweet soon after President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol with deadly results.
“The Speaker has been removed from the chambers,” Boebert wrote.
Twitter users responded by calling for the freshman representative to be jailed and removed from Congress.
“@FBIWFO please arrest @laurenboabert for aiding and abetting those who were hunting down @SpeakerPelosi on Jan, 6th by tweeting the Speaker’s whereabouts,” one person responded. “She’s 5ft tall, 100 pounds and carries a Glock (and won’t stop telling everyone).”
“@SpeakerPelosi you need to have her removed with every fight that you have. This is nothing short of an attempt […]
Stephan: I am amazed that this story is not getting greater coverage. Ginni Thomas, the wife of associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has long been known as a supporter of christofascist causes. But this is absolutely a bridge too far. Thomas should be immediately impeached and removed from the bench. It is preposterous that a supreme court justice's wife is cheering on an anti-democratic coup.
Insurrectionist admirer Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Hours before a violent mob of far-right extremists attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, President Donald Trump and his supporters spoke at an event in Washington D.C. — where they demanded that Congress overturn the electoral college results for the 2020 presidential election. And one of those supporters was conspiracy theorist Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Ginni Thomas tweeted her support of that event on January 6, saying, “LOVE MAGA people!” and “God bless each of you standing up or praying.” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes that after the attack on the Capitol Building, she added an addendum and posted, “Note: written before violence in US Capitol.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1347395084527017985&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alternet.org%2F2021%2F01%2Fginni-thomas-applauded-the-rally-that-preceded-the-capitol-building-attack%2F&partner=rebelmouse&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550pxTired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
Stern, in an article published by Slate on January 8, notes, “Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four […]
Stephan: In the United States, as a culture, we have only one social priority: profit. As a result instead of a health care system, we have an illness profit system. And in our college education system, unique amongst the developed nations of the world, we have people in their sixties still with five-figure student debt. Did you know there are people near or after retirement with that kind of student debt? I didn't. When I went to the University of Virginia as part of an honors program called Echols scholars, my family paid $476 a year for my tuition.
In the 1970s when my daughter Katherine went to the University of California - Santa Cruz, in her own honors program, I paid about $4,600. Today, at a public four-year college (for in-state students) the average is $9,410, while for out-of-state students it is $23,890. For a private four-year college the average is $32,410, more than some families total income for a year, where the necessary living family income across the U.S. is $67,690.
There are all sorts of social outcome effects that arise from America's profit-based college system. First, of course, is the debilitating debt itself. Second, a profit-based college system means many who would like to go to college don't have the means to do so, because they can't handle the debt. As a result, only 36% of Americans over 25 have graduated from college while in Canada over 56% have a post-high school degree, and the U.S. ranks 6th in terms of college education.
But there are all kinds of other social effects. For instance, there is a strong correlation between being a Trumper and not having a college degree. Only 30.2% of the police in the U.S. have college degrees which helps to explain why American law enforcement is so violent. It also explains why so many scientists and physicians working today are immigrants.
Key Findings:
There are more people over the age of 50 with student loans (8.7 million) than people under the age of 24 with student loans (7.8 million), and they owe, on average, far more ($41,058 compared to $14,807).
There are more people over the age of 35 with student loans than under the age of 35 (22.7 million vs. 22.6 million), and they owe far more on average ($41,881 vs. $27,256).
A common popular belief about student loans is that they are a young person’s problem. We assume that, by and large, most borrowers are able to have their loans repaid by their mid-30’s. Sure, there may be a few stragglers who take until their 40’s or even beyond to repay their loans, but the conventional wisdom is that people 50 or older who haven’t yet been able to repay their loans are the outliers. The exception to the rule.
Well, it turns out that this is completely wrong.
This is Department of Education Data for the fourth quarter of 2020. For comparison purposes, we combined the source data to find statistics […]
Stephan: For the past 40 years or more, I have been listening to people interested in UFOs talk about "the government's secret files." Well, we may finally get to see at least some of them.
UFO
When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.No, really.The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about “unidentified aerial phenomena.”It’s a stipulation that was tucked into the “committee comment” section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill.
Pentagon to launch task force to investigate UFO sightingsThat report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee’s directive.It should also describe in detail “an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government” and designate an official responsible for that process.Finally, […]
Theresa K. Vescio and Nathaniel E. C. Schermerhorn, - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Stephan: Based on research I have been tracking for years I have been telling my readers about the correlations between male dominance, "hegemonic masculinity" as it is called in this research report, White supremacy, and christofascism. Now we have new research published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that is quite definitive. The thing you want to note is that many women support hegemonic masculinity.
This is what makes gender equality so difficult to achieve in our culture. But, more than that, this is what fuels the biases of the Republican Party.
Trumpers at the insurrection
Significance
Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been attributed to the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Based on the findings of seven studies involving 2,007 people, men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump over and beyond the aforementioned factors, even when controlling for political party affiliation. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond social identity–based conceptualizations of masculinity to fully consider how men’s and women’s endorsement of cultural ideologies about masculinity legitimate patriarchal forms of dominance and reify gender-, race-, and class-based hierarchies.
Abstract
This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men’s and women’s support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women’s and men’s endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of […]
Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University - The New York Times
Stephan: This is an excellent essay explaining why so many people mindlessly follow Trump, and why a single man, in just four years, destroyed the integrity and honor of one of America's political parties. If we don't learn from his, it is all going to happen again, only the next time the autocrat manipulating it is likely to be more competent. And don't think for a minute we are out of this crisis. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marko Rubio, Louie Gohmert, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and a hundred more Republicans are still in office, and they will have no more integrity tomorrow than they have today, or than they had a week ago.
Insurrectionists at the Capitol. Please note they are overwhelmingly White men. Credit: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/The New York Times
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.
Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to […]
Stephan: You remember a week ago I ran a story about the poor readiness of Air Force planes. Well here is the Navy's version of that story. The United States spends more on its military than the next seven highest nations in the world combined. And you this is what we get. The military-industrial complex and Eisenhower called it has too much money and too little competence. This is not a problem caused by the soldiers and sailors this is the politicians and the corporations who buy them like cattle.
USS Gerald R. Ford Credit: Seapower Magazine
Aircraft takeoff and landing systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford remain unreliable and break down too often more than three years after the $13.2 billion carrier was delivered, according to the Pentagon’s top tester.
The latest assessment of the costliest warship ever built “remains consistent” with previous years, director of testing Robert Behler said in his new summary of the program obtained by Bloomberg News before its release in an annual report.
“Poor or unknown reliability of new technology systems critical for flight operations,” including its $3.5 billion electromagnetic launch system and advanced arresting gear, could “adversely affect” the carrier’s ability to generate sorties, he said.
The Ford’s new systems — which propel planes off the deck and into the sky and then snag them on landing — are crucial to justifying the expense of what’s now a four-vessel, $57 billion program intended to replace the current Nimitz class of aircraft carriers.
The Ford class is also the backbone of the Navy’s aspirations to expand its fleet from 297 vessels today to 355 and then almost […]
Stephan: What I don't understand is why Bill Barr has not been disbarred? The problem with the American government is that there is no accountability. When you get to a certain level things that would put ordinary people in jail for decades produce no accountable response.
William Barr the don’s personal consigliere
Call it the last stand of the confederacy: a Republican administration attempting to roll back decades of civil rights protections for American citizens. Before he left office, former Attorney General Bill Barr submitted a regulatory change to the White House that would narrow the department’s enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the provision that strips federal funding away from entities discriminating against people of color and other groups, including women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. The rule change would mean the civil rights division would only enforce the cases where it could prove intentional discrimination, getting rid of the “disparate impact” rule.
That rule is based on the legal doctrine that a policy is discriminatory if it adversely impacts a group based on that group’s race, color, religion, sex, and, more expansively, sexual orientation. It’s been applied in education, housing, transportation, health care—essentially every facet of government policy by previous administrations, but especially expanded under former President Barack Obama. Trump has been chipping […]
