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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: These large gatherings of heavily armed White militias in public spaces have produced a complex of reactions. First, it has revealed that the police to a large percentage seem to support White militias. Second, the police seem to be afraid of these groups because they can shoot back. Third, they show just how close we are to Rightwing civil violence. Here is a report from Michigan.
Seven year old with her toy assault rifle, accompanied by her White militia father, on the plaza in front of the Michigan capitol. Credit: Dale Young
LANSING — Michigan militia members say they are trying to take their movement mainstream, fashioning themselves as a private security force willing to defend against protests over racial injustice and police brutality that have turned violent in some parts of the state and country.
Dozens of armed members from various militias, most of them white, descended on the Michigan Capitol Thursday, mingling with other fringe groups like Boogaloo Bois and Proud Boys at an annual Second Amendment rally. Their public show of force would have been rare two decades ago, when militias largely operated in secrecy after two men with ties to the early Michigan movement bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City.
“Militias are finally starting to realize that we have an important role in the public eye,” said Phil Robinson, a Barry County resident and co-founder of the Michigan Liberty Militia. “The time is not to hide in the shadows. The time is […]
Stephan: America is on a knife edge of civil violence made all the worse because Trump is urging the police to kill more people. There is no argument about this, the proof is all in his own words.
Discussing the recent police killing of a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a far-right activist in Portland, Oregon, President Donald Trump openly endorsed extrajudicial executions in a Fox News interview Saturday, declaring that “there has to be retribution.”
“I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him,” the president told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, referring to Michael Forest Reinoehl. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”
Trump’s comments came days after an ordained minister who lives in an apartment complex near where Reinoehl was shot and killed by members of a law enforcement task force earlier this month in Lacey, Washington said it was not at all clear that Reinoehl was armed when police gunned him down.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
As the Washington Postreported, the witness alleges that “Reinoehl was clutching a cellphone and […]
Sam Stein Asawin Suebsaeng Sam Brodey Jackie Kucinich, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Mitch McConnell is a man devoid of integrity. He is a true orc. Yet the people of Kentucky don't seem to care that he has no honor only a lust for power, and at this moment they look like they will vote him back into office for another term. Because he lacks integrity or honor he will, as he says, try to ram through another unqualified Republican to sit on the Supreme Court, and if he is successful we will all have to live with that court for decades.
Mitch MConnell, a man lacking in basic integrity
On Feb. 13, 2016, then-Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead in a ranch bedroom in Texas. It was 268 days before the November election and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was quick to quip that there would not be a replacement until the next president was chosen.
On Friday evening, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of complications from cancer 46 days before the presidential election. But McConnell has already made it clear that he sees no reason to wait for voters to weigh in on who should pick her replacement. The Kentucky Republican declared just hours after the death was announced: “President Donald Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
McConnell’s monomaniacal focus on filling the courts with young conservatives will be tested in the next few months by a variety of factors. But the main one will be whether four Senate Republicans will prove unwilling to go along with confirming a replacement for Ginsburg after their party […]
Stephan: According to Feeding America, sixteen million American kids struggle with hunger each year. An estimated 48.8 million Americans , including 16.2 million children, live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. As a result, about 1 in 5 children go hungry at some point during the year.
A hungry child in Los Angeles, California, one of millions of American children experiencingfood stress and hunger. Credit: KMPH
Millions of children across the United States are already going hungry amid the economic recession spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, and emergency food assistance is set to expire on September 30 as Congress remains at an impasse over stimulus legislation. The House has already passed legislation that would renew the emergency food assistance, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to take it up in the Senate.
During the last week of August, up to 14 percent of parents reported that they could not consistently afford to feed their children as millions of people remain without work due to efforts to contain the coronavirus, according to federal data crunched by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). About 1 in 10 adults reported that their households did not have enough to eat at some point in the last seven days, including 19 percent of Black adults and 17 percent of Latinx adults. These figures add to reams of […]
Stephan: The state of the United States is so dire that other civilization threatening trends are getting hardly any coverage. But that does not mean they are not happening. The destruction by humans of the matrix of life is one example. I did a first report on this just the other day. but I am doing this second article, because I think this trend is that important
URL Citation: https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/4783129/LPR/PDFs/ENGLISH-FULL.pdf
A baby turtle is released into the ocean in Bali, Indonesia, Tuesday, June 9, 2020. Roughly a hundred newly hatched Lekang turtles were released during a campaign to save the endangered sea turtles. Credit: AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati
Human activities have caused the world’s wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund.
The decline is happening at an unprecedented rate, the report warns, and it threatens human life as well.
“The findings are clear,” the report states. “Our relationship with nature is broken.”
The Living Planet Report 2020 report drew on wildlife monitoring of more than 4,300 different vertebrate species – animals, fish, birds and amphibians – from around the world. It found that population sizes for those monitored species declined by an average of 68 percent from 1970 to 2016.
In the American tropics, including the Caribbean and Latin America, population sizes decreased by a staggering 94 percent.
Forest clearing for agricultural space was the predominant cause of the decline, the report says, noting that one-third of the […]
Stephan: You don't have over 5 million acres and several towns go up in smoke here in the West without significant financial implications. Here is a first take on this.
An aerial view of a neighborhood destroyed by the Camp Fire on November 15, 2018 in Paradise, California. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty
The many wildfires roaring through America’s West Coast don’t just look scary, they are bad for people’s health, bad for public and private lands, and bad for the economy.
The plumes of smoke have pushed air quality to hazardous levels forcing residents to stay indoors. Now some of the dirtiest air on Earth is wafting along the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles up to the Canadian border. Millions of people are at the mercy of merciless flames.
So far, well over 5 million acres have burned across California, Oregon, Washington State and neighboring Idaho. Many of the fires are still not under control and tens of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes and at least 27 people have died. Many of the survivors have nothing to come back to.
In August, California was pummeled by an incredible heat wave. Temperatures in Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, “possibly the hottest […]
Stephan: Language is a self-reinforcing expression of consciousness. Which words you choose? How you pronounce them? Accents are agreements. Fox has become a language, an expression of consciousness and FOX's popularity is a fact that cannot be ignored. It is the expression of a worldview We have reached, I think, a social dynamic not seen since the pre-Civil War years. It is very unclear to me how the election is going to play out because more than a third of the population holds this worldview.
All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.
You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.
Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo […]
Stephan: This report says, "This is devastating. Climate change is playing a role in this." Desmond said. "We lost 3 billion birds in the US since 1970 and we've also seen a tremendous decline in insects, so an event like this is terrifying to these populations and it's devastating to see." I can't improve on that. Bees, butterflies and other insects, birds, all in human-caused crisis.
Dead migrating birds. The number of dead birds is in the six figures, a university biologist says
Biologists at New Mexico State University are trying to find out why hundreds of thousands of migratory birds have been found dead across the state.The mystery started August 20 with the discovery of a large number of dead birds at the US Army White Sands Missile Range and White Sands National Monument, according to Martha Desmond, a professor at the university’s department of fish, wildlife and conservation ecology.What was first believed to be an isolated incident turned out to be a much more serious problem when hundreds more dead birds were found in regions across the state. including Doña Ana County, Jemez Pueblo, Roswell and Socorro.”It’s just terrible,” Desmond told CNN. “The number is in the six figures. Just by looking at the scope of what we’re seeing, we know this is a very large event, hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of dead birds, and we’re looking at the higher end of that.”Dead migratory birds — which include […]
