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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: This report raises what I consider to be a critically important issue. Mainstream media, particularly cable media simply does not cover the news. It becomes obsessed with something and mostly the news is an endless commentary about that issue. Typically an hour of "news" is an A block, a B block and then lesser C and D blocks. That's it. To really become even modestly familiar with the news of the world one has to listen to the British BBC, the Chinese, CGTV, and Islamic Aljazeera. Read the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Asia Times.
But what really worries me is that American media is not properly covering climate change in all its aspects. The most important trend that is going to change every aspect of life on earth goes weeks without a mention on CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN. On top of that the most watched television cable network FOX, is a deliberate propaganda operation in which facts play little or no role. As a result for many Americans it is almost impossible to sort actual news from ideological crap.
There is going to be a big price for this.
Flooding caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico’s coastal town of Loiza. Credit:Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo / The Washington Post/Getty
To hear many journalists tell it, the spring of 2020 has brought a series of extraordinary revelations. Look at what the nation has learned: that our health care system was not remotely up to the challenge of a deadly pandemic. That our economic safety net was largely nonexistent. That our vulnerability to disease and death was directly tied to our race and where we live. That our political leadership sowed misinformation that left people dead. That systemic racism and the killing of Black people by police is undiminished, despite decades of protest and so many Black lives lost.
Journalism is now engaged in explaining and contextualizing this moment, a frenzy of feature writing prompted by the filling of morgues and the throngs of people in the streets. Some of these pieces will be impressive; a few will win our most prestigious journalism prizes. We’ll look back at the spring of 2020 and congratulate ourselves on the central role played by […]
Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach,, Reporters - LMTonline/Washington Post
Stephan: The Covid-19 coronavirus (19 because it was first detected in 2019) is a mutation or, more accurately, one stage of a mutation.
The nations of the world, through the UN, should be putting together an international pandemic task force to track these mutations, and each country should be establishing some kind of agency or department to plan, prepare, and put into place around the country the supplies needed for pandemics. This is only the beginning. Instead, we have a president and an administration that is acting like this pandemic is nothing to worry about, back to normal, everything handled. That even as 128,000 people are dead and over 2 million cases have been reported. Donald Trump and Mike Pence are mass murderers, and I think that is how history will treat them.
When the first coronavirus cases in Chicago appeared in January, they bore the same genetic signatures as a germ that emerged in China weeks before.
But as Egon Ozer, an infectious-disease specialist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, examined the genetic structure of virus samples from local patients, he noticed something different.
A change in the virus was appearing again and again. This mutation, associated with outbreaks in Europe and New York, eventually took over the city. By May, it was found in 95% of all the genomes Ozer sequenced.
At a glance, the mutation seemed trivial. About 1,300 amino acids serve as building blocks for a protein on the surface of the virus. In the mutant virus, the genetic instructions for just one of those amino acids – number 614 – switched in the new variant from a “D” (shorthand for aspartic acid) to a “G” (short for glycine).
But the location was significant, because the switch occurred in the part of the genome that codes for the all-important “spike protein” – the protruding structure that gives the coronavirus […]
Ketchup, mustard, onion and relish on a hot dog with US Flag, Credit: Getty
If you think you’re eating meat when you have a hot dog, I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been getting played. We all have.
What’s actually in them, then? “They’re just tubes of fat,” Tyler Rouse, a pathologist at the Stratford General Hospital in Ontario, Canada, explained to Scientific American.
Rouse got curious as to what exactly where in dogless hot dogs a couple years ago and realized that he had the ability to figure it out. “We work in a lab, we make slides all day. Hot dogs are kind of the perfect shape to make into a slide. We can actually answer this question.” He recounted how he figured it out to the publication.
So he and his colleague Jordan Radigan got their hands on three types of dogs: a no-name brand from the supermarket, another all-beef dog and a third from a ballpark vendor. They then took cross sections for slides and used stains to identify different types of tissue. And found, to […]
Stephan: It is clear to me, and perhaps to you, that Donald Trump and the Trumplicans, are going full White supremacy and christofascist. I get that. what concerns me is that they know it won't be enough, and so we are going to see a truly despicable effort to rig and suppress the vote. Nothing will stop this except citizen mass protests. What are you prepared to do to protect American democracy?
Shutterstock/The Atlantic
On june 9, primary day, hundreds of people surrounded Park Tavern, a sprawling brewery and restaurant in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. They queued in six-foot increments, and the line wrapped around the parking lot. Two nearby polling locations were closed, so this was where 16,000 Atlantans were slated to cast their ballots. Across the metro area, more than 80 voting locations had been closed or consolidated over concerns about the coronavirus. What’s worse: The new state-ordered voting machines had stopped working.
Some people waited for more than three hours to vote; others left before casting their ballots. Georgia’s meltdown was not an anomaly. The 2020 primary began with a malfunctioning app in the Iowa caucus, rendering the first-in-the-nation contest moot. One month later, on Super Tuesday, voters met hours-long waits in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and Sacramento. Another month passed, thousands of Americans were dying of the coronavirus, and state officials began canceling primaries. Wisconsin’s state legislature forced its April primary through anyway. Milwaukee voters stood masked in a hailstorm, waiting to vote at one of just five polling […]
Stephan: We now have a Supreme Court in which four justices make their decisions on the basis of their prejudices and ideology rather than on the basis of the Constitution and the laws. This is what the vile Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump have been working for these past four years. The Republican Party has become a White christofascist cult, and they know they are increasingly outnumbered which is why they have been working so hard to rig the judiciary and accomplish voter suppression.
Activists in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Credit: Getty
The Supreme Court handed down two brief, unsigned orders on Friday concerning what restrictions states may place on absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Though neither order is a final judgment — one grants a temporary stay of a lower court decision, the other denies expedited review of an important voting rights case — the practical impact of both orders is that voters in Alabama and Texas will find it harder to cast a ballot during the pandemic.
The Texas order is particularly ominous because it suggests that Texas will be able to apply election rules that ensure that older, Republican-leaning voters have an easy time casting a ballot — while younger voters could be forced to risk infection in order to vote.
Stephan: Here is a somewhat more hopeful take on the current judiciary situation. May it be so.
President Trump shakes hands with Judge Neil M. Gorsuch in the White House East Room on Jan. 31, 2017, during an event to announce Trump’s nomination of Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
President Trump has retained support from many Republicans and conservatives thanks to a Faustian bargain: So long as he stacks the judiciary with friendly judges, they’ll look the other way when he pushes trade protectionism, ditches entitlement reform or woos Russian President Vladimir Putin — positions out of step with recent conservative orthodoxy.
Former George W. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo said that he had deeply conservative friends “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” yet supported him “only because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy” on the Supreme Court. Conservative fixation with judges goes beyond the Supreme Court, including the lower courts as well. Noting that the Supreme Court hears a tiny fraction of the cases decided by appellate judges, Washington Post contributing columnist Hugh Hewitt challenged Trump’s conservative critics to “reconcile their vehement […]
Stephan: This is what all the previous stories are really about. This is why Trump is going full racist. This is why the Republican Party has become a White supremacist cult working on dismantling our democracy. This is what all the voter suppression is about. America sometime in the next 25 years will become a majority-minority nation, and the 250 plus year old White "get out of jail card" will be rescinded. It is freaking a lot of people out.
Credit: Win McNamee/Getty
U.S. racial and ethnic minorities accounted for all of the nation’s population growth during the last decade, according to new Census Bureau estimates.
The data underscore the nation’s growing diversity and suggest that the trend will continue as the White population ages and low birth rates translate to a declining share. Non-Hispanic Whites declined to 60.1% of the populace in 2019 and their number shrank by about 9,000 from the 2010 Census to slightly more than 197 million.
Over the same period, the U.S. added 10.1 million people identified as Hispanic. The median age for White non-Hispanics rose to 43.7 years — more than a decade older than the median Hispanic of any race — with Black and Asian American residents in between.
“The declining White population share is pervasive across the nation,” according to a report by William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The decline was “accentuated in the past few years by a reduction of births among young adult White women and an uptick in deaths, […]
Stephan: If Joe Biden wins the presidency and the Senate flips to Democratic, from what I read, and learn from talking to people close to Biden's, campaign, I think there is a real chance America will do what is necessary to transform the country so it can survive in the age of climate change. It is up to us, you and me, to make that happen.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Joe Biden’s campaign is unveiling a “Climate Engagement Advisory Council” this morning aimed at “mobilizing” voters who prioritize climate change and environmental justice.
Why it matters: November’s election is a stark contrast between Biden, whose platform goes much further than Obama-era policies, and President Trump, who largely dismisses the problem and is rolling back his predecessor’s initiatives.
And activism stemming from the police killing of George Floyd is putting fresh focus on environmental justice — that is, addressing the disproportionate pollution burdens facing people of color and poor communities.
How it works: Members of the newly unveiled council named this morning are…
Tom Steyer, the billionaire activist and donor
Dr. Cecilia Martinez, executive director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy
Lonnie R. Stephenson, head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
Deb Haaland, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico
Carol Browner, a top climate official in the Obama years and current board chair of the League of Conservation Voters
Harold Mitchell, Jr., a former South Carolina state representative and founder of the ReGenesis Community Development Corporation
