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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: By almost any social outcome data you care to cite from infant mortality to longevity we are a nation in precipitous decline. Nicholas Kristof lays it out very well. The only thing that is going to change this is we ourselves. Four more years of Trump and we will be a christofascist kleptocratic oligarchy. The choice is yours. You have until November 3rd to decide which side you are on.
This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward.
A woman in Pennington Gap, Va., a town that has suffered the ravages of the epidemic of despair. Credit:. Johnathon Kelso/The New York Times
The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.
“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”
The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure […]
Stephan: Climate Change is upon us, whether the Republican Party believes in it or not. The clock is ticking, and Trump and the Republicans are responding to climate change the same way they did with Covid-19 -- utterly inadequately.
Channels of warm ocean water melting the ice from below threaten the stability of Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica. Credit: AFP/Getty
British scientists have mapped cavities half the size of the Grand Canyon that are allowing warm ocean water to erode the vast Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic, accelerating the rise of sea levels across the world.
Like decay in a tooth, the channels of warm water are melting the ice from below, threatening the stability of a glacier that is larger than Great Britain.
Using an aircraft, ship and robot submarine, the British Antarctic Survey and a US team traced the seabed terrain and the bottom of the ice shelf to measure the gaps that have opened between previously grounded sections of the glacier.
They measured two old cavities that were roughly six miles (10km) across and 800 metres deep, which allow warm water to seep under the ice. These have formed over at least 10,000 years. In addition, they mapped several new, thinner fissures that have branched off from these main trunks amid the warmer temperatures of the […]
Stephan: I have been writing about climate change migrations in the U.S. and internationally (see SR archive) for years. There should be an international effort to prepare for what is coming both internationally and internally in the U.S.. But it is not happening at anything close to the level that will be needed.
A woman walks past destroyed houses on May 13, 2019, on her way to an aid distribution center in the coastal village of Guludo on Ibo Island, in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, in the aftermath of a devastating cyclone. Credit: Zinyange Auntony/AFP/Getty
An analysis released Wednesday by an international think tank warns that as the world’s population continues to climb toward and possibly surpass 10 billion by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace roughly 10% of humanity—or about 1.2 billion people.
“Ecological change is the next big global threat to our planet and people’s lives, and we must unlock the power of business and government action to build resilience for the places most at risk.” —Steve Killelea, IEP
The inaugural Ecological Threat Register (ETR) was published by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), known for producing the Global Peace Index and Global Terrorism Index. The new report (pdf) analyzes the risks of population growth, water stress, food insecurity, droughts, floods, cyclones, and rising temperature and sea levels as well as the degree to which countries and territories worldwide are prepared to […]
Stephan: If you have watched the news today, you know that what was hidden has now become explicit, and it is clear that it is not that Trump didn't know about the reality of Covid-19, or was incompetent, instead he knew and chose to put himself first and the country second. It is on tape in his own words. As I watched and read the news today, what I kept thinking was can we actually get rid of this monster and his orcs in November? I'm not sure. I watched FOX the most watched network and I did not see a single honest story. Therefore, I know that millions of Americans see everything that is happening as the unfair persecution of Trump as depicted by FOX. I looked at fiveThirtyEight and it shows 42.8% of voters still support Trump and his administration, and I simply cannot imagine what this country would look like after four more years of Trump. My wife and I are not even sure we could live in such a country.
Watergate reporter Bob Woodward’s new book is coming out next week — and the leaked excerpts in it contain multiple damaging bombshells for President Donald Trump.
The new book, entitled “Rage,” contains multiple revelations on a wide variety of topics ranging from the president’s handling of the novel coronavirus to his relationship with the American military to his strange affection for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
1.) Trump said that he knew the novel coronavirus was five times more deadly than the seasonal flu — then admitted to playing it down in public.
Audio recordings show that Trump told Woodward in early February that COVID-19 spread through the air and was much more deadly than the flu. Despite this, he continued to downplay its significance in multiple public statements.
Just over a month after that, Trump admitted to Woodward that he deliberately downplayed the virus because he didn’t want to create a “panic.”
Shane Harris, Nick Miroff and Ellen Nakashima, - The Washington Post
Stephan: As you probably already know today has been one horror story of Trump criminal deceit after another. I am not going to do most of them because they are already so widely covered they don't need SR. But this one stood out for me because it so directly affects the security of the country, and so clearly illustrates that Trump is in some way compromised and under the control of Putin. History, I think, is going to reveal that Trump from the day he became a candidate has been a traitor.
Today I watched CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and FOX. It was fascinating. The first three networks told variations of the same stories. FOX reported another reality entirely. The only mention they made of the stories covered in the previous article was why didn't Bob Woodward publish this book earlier? It was all his fault. And they do this with a straight face, knowing perfectly well that they are lying and promoting disinformation.
President Trump, flanked by Attorney General William P. Barr and acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf, speaks in Kenosha, Wis., on Sept. 1. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence reports on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.
The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat and alleged that senior officials told him to modify other intelligence reports, including about white supremacists, to bring them in line with President Trump’s public comments, directions he said he refused.
On July 8, Murphy said in the complaint, acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a […]
Stephan: What many people fail to realize is that there is a cost, a big cost, when gatherings of people do something stupid. like not practicing social distancing or wearing masks, and the Sturgis biker rally illustrates that point very clearly.
Note that the public cost, that is the cost you and I pay for public programs to remediate stupidity like the Sturgis rally, is in the billions.
Sturgis, south Dakota biker rally, a glaring example of mass stupidity
The inevitable fallout from last month’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an annual event that packed nearly 500,000 people into a small town in South Dakota, is becoming clear, and the emerging picture is grim.
According to a new study, which tracked anonymized cellphone data from the rally, over 250,000 coronavirus cases have now been tied to the 10-day event, one of the largest to be held since the start of the pandemic. It drew motorcycle enthusiasts from around the country, many of whom were seen without face coverings inside crowded bars, restaurants, and other indoor establishments.
The explosion in cases, the study from the Germany-based IZA Institute of Labor Economics finds, is expected to reach $12 billion in public health costs.
“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally represents a situation where many of the ‘worst-case scenarios’ for super-spreading occurred simultaneously,” the researchers wrote, “the event was prolonged, included individuals packed closely together, involved a large out-of-town population, and had low compliance with recommended infection countermeasures such as the use of masks.”
Stephan: If you have been reading me regularly you know I am increasingly concerned about the terrorism of White christofascist militias. Trump has encouraged and supported these people and, as a result, they have come out of the shadows and are increasingly assertive and violent. And I am not the only person with this view. Here is a report on the thinking of someone who studies insurgencies. What is clear to me is that we have to get the Republicans out of the Senate and the White House, and start building a society based on wellbeing
Members of far-right militias and white pride organizations rally near Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on Aug. 15. Credit: Logan Cyrus/Getty
David Kilcullen is one of the world’s leading authorities on insurgencies. For decades he has studied them. As an infantry soldier in the Australian army and an adviser to the U.S. Army, he’s fought against them. His latest scholarly work has focused on their role in urban conflicts.
So when Kilcullen says that America is in a state of “incipient insurgency,” it’s worth sitting up, taking notice, and trembling just a little.
The official definition of an insurgency is the “organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control” of an area. An “incipient insurgency” might be happening when “inchoate actions by a range of groups”—followed by organizing, training, acquisition of resources (including arms), and the buildup of public support—lead to “increasingly frequent” incidents of violence, reflecting “improved organization and forethought.”
Kilcullen argues that this is what we’ve been seeing the past few months in the waves of provocations and street violence that have blown through American cities since the […]
Corby Kummer, Executive Director of the Food and Society Policy Program at the Aspen Institute and a Senior Editor at The Atlantic. - The New York Times
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years that industrial chemical monoculture agriculture was destroying the earth's ecosystem, and was going to ultimately create a food crisis that would affect us all. Here is an excellent assessment describing where this trend stands today.
Tom Philpott Credit: Gabriel C. Pérez
PERILOUS BOUNTY The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It By Tom Philpott
In a world where it’s impossible to keep up with the urgent and awful stories that seem to get worse by the week, it’s easy to lose track of all we worried about in before times — little stuff like whether food-borne illnesses were killing hundreds of people. Is that still going on?
The answer is of course: Yes. As I write, more than 900 cases of salmonella have been linked to onions. And in our time of lockdown, there has been no end to stories of fields of ripe produce being plowed under, millions of gallons of milk dumped and millions of chickens slaughtered for lack of ways to bring them to the supermarkets and food banks that need them. We’ve lost track of just how badly served the planet has been by the agriculture and distribution systems that evolved in the name of efficiency and price competition.
Shutting your eyes may be presidential policy, but the journalist […]
