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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: While the news is consumed with Trump's contracting Covid-19 don't think for a moment that he, his orcs, and his cult/party, are not doing everything in their power to sabotage American democracy to assure a Trump re-election. They are, and they are quite explicit about it.
US President Donald Trump speaks during the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 29, 2020. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
President Trump’s campaign is waging a behind-the-scenes effort to threaten low-profile county officials into ignoring election rules and sowing doubt in the mail voting process.
Trump’s campaign launched an “unusually aggressive” push on the local level, sending 100 county election officials in North Carolina “threatening letters” and “misinformation” to urge them to disregard a new rule that makes it easier for voters to fix mistakes on their mail ballots, according to the Associated Press. The warnings came after the state Board of Elections settled a lawsuit after ballots cast by Black voters in the state were disproportionately rejected.Advertisement:
The campaign also sent letters to more than 1,800 municipal clerks in states like Wisconsin and Georgia that raised questions about the security of mail voting, according to CNN. The campaign also threatened to sue officials in Pennsylvania for blocking “poll watchers” from observing election offices where people register to vote and […]
Stephan: And this is what the corporatists who support QAnon are buying, the corruption of American law enforcement.
And as a result of their efforts, as the Gallup Organization reported this summer, "confidence in the police had fallen five points, to 48 percent, from the year before. Gallup, which started tracking the public’s confidence in a range of public institutions in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, adding the police in 1993, said this was the “first time in the 27-year trend that this reading is below the majority.”
But, and this is important to note, this is not a population-wide decline. Gallup reported that Republican confidence in the police actually went up seven points, and is now at 82%. In contrast, Democrats dropped six points, to 28%.
Credit: Getty
Chances are, you already don’t trust the police. Polls show that most Americans don’t.
But what if the cop patrolling your neighborhood held bizarre and unsubstantiated views? What if there was a chance that officer in the patrol car idling down the block was watching videos about a conspiracy holding that a satanic cabal of high-profile liberal pedophiles is running the world’s most insidious sex ring? Or was swiping through memes popularizing a made-up plot about kidnapped children kept in underground tunnels so their blood can be harvested to help keep wealthy people alive? And what if they sincerely believed it all?
In a small but growing number of places across the country, that’s just what is happening, as police officers have endorsed QAnon, the overarching conspiracy theory comprising these beliefs.“I’m merely someone who sits on my couch late at night with my dog on my lap, iPhone in hand, while seeking the truth.”
Nico Roche, an officer in Bellevue, Washington, was put on administrative leave early this summer after it was found that he violated the department’s social media policies for, […]
Stephan: I think it is very important that my readers understand what powers and lies beneath the resurgence of White Supremacy because it has become the defining profile of one of our major parties -- the Republicans.
You rarely hear it mentioned, and when I ask people I have yet to find anyone who can tell me how many Blacks have served in the U.S. Senate. The answer is that over the last 150 years, since 1870, when Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black senator, there have only been nine more, for a total of 10. In contrast, there have been 1,964 White (and a few Hispanic) senators. Currently, there is only one Black Republican senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Kamala Harris of California are the two Black Democrats currently serving.
2013 marked the first time in American history that there was more than one Black senator. Hispanics fare only slightly better. They represent over 14% of the U.S. population, while the Senate is 3% Hispanic and the House is approximately 5% (25 members) Hispanic.
This essay addresses some of the reasons for this glaring disparity.
Illustration by Anthony Russo/The New Yorker
As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” a memoir of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott—a protest that, at three hundred and eighty-two days, was the most sustained mass action in American history. It had led both to a Supreme Court decision that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional and to retaliatory bombings of Black churches. The book tour was meant to mobilize support for the movement’s next phase, but days after his first event he’d been kicked, choked, and arrested by the Montgomery police. And now, in Harlem on September 20th, he was being denounced as an Uncle Tom for not appearing at a Black-owned bookstore whose politics conflicted with the mainstream image he was trying to project. So he sat at a table with a pile of books at the white-owned Blumstein’s […]
Stephan: Beginning in the 1960s the consciousness of the United States began to change. It was, in my view the result of four trends, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the beginning of the environmental movement, all stimulated by the widespread use of Marijuana, formerly considered a Black drug, and especially LSD, which was tried by culture shapers like musicians and artists. As it happens I knew many of the pioneers in the drug movement such as, Tim Leary, Richard Alpert, and John Lilly and, of course, sampled most those mind-altering substances myself. It completely freaked out the corporate political establishment because it changed people's consciousness and called into question all sorts of assumptions about how society was supposed to operate and to whose benefit.
This all came to a crescendo on June 18, 1971 when Richard Nixon, the most criminal president in American history until Donald Trump, officially declared a “War on Drugs,” stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.” The result of that being that hundreds of thousands of young Americans had their lives destroyed. Life sentences for being caught with a handful of marijuana were not unknown. One of the other side-effects of the hysteria about drugs was that the medical uses of psychedelics were stopped or driven underground. Now, decades later when this particular social insanity is not quite as acute, that line of research has re-emerged. Here is a good report on what is going on.
Illustration by Trap Bob
On a sweaty Sunday morning in August of last year, Jamilah George was on the 16th floor of the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville, leading a spiritual service of sorts. George, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Connecticut who also holds a master’s degree in divinity from Yale University, asked the audience to shout out the names of ancestors or people they admired. With each name, George performed a libation ritual, pouring water into a leafy green plant, stationed at the front of the podium, as a gesture of thanks. “Maya Angelou,” called out one audience member. “Mama Lola,” called another. The names kept coming: Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde. Mahatma Gandhi. Harriet Tubman.
George, who had been part of a team at U-Conn. running the only clinical trial to study the effects of the psychotropic drug MDMA on post-traumatic stress disorder with participants of color, wanted the audience to connect with its cultural lineages before she started her presentation — a bracing call for inclusion and social justice within the burgeoning world […]
Andrew Latham, Professor of Political Science - Raw Story
Stephan: As we go through the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps it is useful to think about what other, earlier, pandemics have done to the social orders in which they occurred.
The Forum Rome, Italy Credit: AFP
Before March of this year, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history.
Not so anymore. People are beginning to understand that the little changes COVID-19 has already ushered in or accelerated – telemedicine, remote work, social distancing, the death of the handshake, online shopping, the virtual disappearance of cash and so on – have begun to change their way of life. They may not be sure whether these changes will outlive the pandemic. And they may be uncertain whether these changes are for good or ill.
First, they can profoundly alter a society’s fundamental worldview. Second, they can upend core economic structures. And, finally, they can sway power struggles among nations.
Stephan: The Republican Senate is about the confirm, in a scandalous charade, a Roman Catholic fundamentalist to the Supreme Court. A woman who believes women should be submissive to men. One whose opposition to Roe v Wade is already well-known. If Barrett is confirmed, by this time next year a woman's right to choose may be gone. How do you feel about that?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nearly eight in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal to some degree, and a majority don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned. At the same time, the country is far from unified on the extent to which abortion should be legal.
According to Gallup’s May 2020 update on Americans’ abortion views, 29% believe abortion should be legal “under any circumstances,” 14% say it should be legal “under most circumstances” and 35% say it should be legal “only in a few circumstances.” Meanwhile, 20% say it should be illegal in all circumstances.
The combined 79% of Americans who think abortion should be legal in all or under certain circumstances echoes the majority public support Gallup consistently finds for upholding Roe v. Wade. Gallup measured public support for the landmark abortion decision ahead of the 2018 confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the findings are discussed in this article:
Stephan: Because the Republican Party and the Trump administration are submissive to corporate carbon energy interests upon who they depend for funding, the United States is not only not a world leader in mitigating climate change, we are saboteurs of such efforts, as this report describes. Every American should feel ashamed, I certainly do, and wonder what I will tell my 8-year-old grandson when he is older and asks, "How did the people of America let this happen?"
A September 17, 2020 report by the Rhodium Group calculates that 1.8 billion tons more greenhouse gases will be released over the next 15 years as a result of climate change rollbacks the Trump administration has achieved so far. Pete Linforth / Pixabay / CC0
When President Donald Trump visited California on September 14 and dismissed the state Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot’s plea to recognize the role of climate change in the midst of the Golden State’s worst and most dangerous recorded fire season to date, he gaslighted the tens of millions of West Coast residents suffering through the ordeal.
While Trump declared that the weather will just “start getting cooler” and that science is irrelevant to the wildfires, millions were struggling to breathe through the toxic smoke that gave Portland the week-long distinction of having the most hazardous air on the planet, with pollution levels in Seattle and San Francisco close behind. Whole towns in California and Oregon have been destroyed by the wildfires.
A growing body of scientific evidence over the last several decades […]
Stephan: America has a serious overweight problem, and the data gets more and more definitive with each passing year that being overweight or obese is literally killing you. In the United States, 32.5% of American adults are overweight and 36.5% of adults are even fatter and considered obese. That is a total of 69% of Americans, and the percentage goes up every year. It has increased 28% since 2008.
Being overweight is linked to an increased risk for premature death, but which part of the body carries the added fat could make a big difference. Extra weight in some places may actually lower the risk.
Researchers, writing in BMJ, reviewed 72 prospective studies that included more than two and a half million participants with data on body fat and mortality. They found that central adiposity — a large waist — was consistently associated with a higher risk of all-cause mortality. In pooled data from 50 studies, each four-inch increase in waist size was associated with an 11 percent increased relative risk for premature death. The association was significant after adjusting for smoking, physical activity and alcohol consumption.
Waist size is an indicator of the amount of visceral fat, or fat stored in the abdomen around the internal organs. This kind of fat is associated with an increased risk for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
But increased fat in two places appears to be associated with a lower risk of death. Three studies showed that […]
