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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.
Frances Stead Sellers , Senior Writer - The Washington Post
Stephan: When you stress a system all its weaknesses and flaws come into focus. If you go into the SR archives you will find over a dozen stories tracking the degradation of the water distribution infrastructure. America once led the world in water purity for citizens. That is no longer true, and the data is unequivocal about this. And so we have come to this.
Cassandra Chavez, 19, had a lung condition in her early teens. The Chavez family suspects that the ailment was caused by the nitrate-contaminated well water at their small ranch. Credit:Melina Mara/The Washington Post
For the Chavez family and many others in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley, bottled water is the toilet paper of their coronavirus pandemic — an everyday necessity that vanished from supermarket shelves.
In the Navajo Nation, where about a third of the population lacks indoor plumbing, volunteers are creating public hand-washing stations by repurposing detergent bottles as makeshift faucets.
And Jessica Endicott, who lives in the tiny community of Turkey Creek in eastern Kentucky, said the virus has exacerbated distrust of the local water, which leaves her skin red and itchy every time she bathes.
Having plundered several major cities, the novel coronavirus is taking root in marginalized rural communities. Many of them lack clean water, making it impossible for residents to shelter at home or wash their hands frequently.
The pandemic is highlighting the yawning racial and socio-economic disparities in access to clean water and intensifying […]
KEVIN RUDD, Former Prime Minister of Australia and President of the Asia Society Policy Institute - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: This, in my opinion, is a brilliant geopolitical assessment by Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia. It is also an utter condemnation of Donald Trump. I urge you to read it.
The USS Porter fires a tomahawk land attack missile, April 2017
In January and February of this year, there was audible popping of champagne corks in certain quarters of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. What some observers had long seen as this era’s giant geopolitical bubble had finally begun to deflate. China’s Communist Party leadership, the thinking went, was at last coming apart, a result of its obsession with official secrecy, its initial missteps in responding to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and the unfolding economic carnage across the country.
Then, as China began to recover and the virus migrated to the West in March and April, irrational jubilation turned to irrational despair. The commentariat greeted with outrage any possibility that the pandemic might in fact help China emerge triumphant in the ongoing geopolitical contest with the United States. This concern was a product of China’s seemingly cunning remolding of the narrative on the origins of the virus, the brutal efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model in containing it, and Beijing’s global COVID-aid campaign. China’s own nationalist commentariat happily […]
Stephan: Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the corporate oligarchs behind them are trying to play the entire nation with their political theater. Trump's Red Hats are the modern-day equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and the democracy of the United States balances on a knife edge.
People hold signs and flags during a protest against measures aimed at slowing the spread of the new coronavirus Friday, May 1, 2020, in San Diego. Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Infamously, he called the white supremacist street marauders and other hooligans who rampaged through Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others, “very fine people.”
Donald Trump slurs and condemns black athletes who protest police brutality and other human rights violations as “sons of bitches.”
Trump is now praising his followers who at his treasonous command are “protesting” social distancing and stay-at-home public health rules, largely in states and cities led by Democratic mayors and governors.
Stephan: The Republican cult does not like democracy and, knowing they are a minority, will do anything they can to cheat and skew an election outcome. You cannot be ethical and a Republican. That is not a partisan statement, it is just a statement of fact.
Please do the country a favor Coloradians and send this scum back to the sewer from which he came.
Colorado Republican Representative Ken Buck
Colorado Republican Party Chair Ken Buck, a U.S. representative from Windsor, pressured a local party official to submit incorrect election results to set the primary ballot for a state Senate seat, according to an audio recording of a conference call obtained by The Denver Post.
“You’ve got a sitting congressman, a sitting state party chair, who is trying to bully a volunteer — I’m a volunteer; I don’t get paid for this — into committing a crime,” Eli Bremer, the GOP chairman for state Senate District 10, told The Post on Wednesday, confirming the authenticity of the recording. “To say it’s damning is an understatement.”
Buck says he was merely asking Bremer to abide by a committee decision.
At issue is the Republican primary for the District 10 seat currently held by Sen. Owen Hill, who’s term-limited. State Rep. Larry Liston and GOP activist David Stiver both ran for it. To qualify for the November ballot via the caucus and assembly process, a candidate must receive 30% of the vote from Republicans within the district.
Nick Lavars, Writer - Wageningen University/New Atlas
Stephan: The research upon which this report is based was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Here is a really clear exposition, on an aspect of climate change many don't seem to consider. As I have been saying for years, in the United States we are going to have three big migrations. Away from coastlines because of sea rise, and temperature. Out of the Southwest because of lack of water and temperature. Out of the south-central states because of violent weather events, temperature, and a lack of water.
But as this research study makes clear it is going to be much bigger than that. This report concludes that by 2070, 3.5 billion humans will be in nearly unliveable conditions. You think they will just stay there? No, neither do I. The entire world including the United States is going to be stressed in ways the Covid-19 virus pandemic just hints at.
We are either going to grow up and awaken to the matrix of life, and figure out how to live within it in a way that fosters wellbeing, or hundreds of millions of us are going to die. Overpopulation, which used to obsess us is not going to be an issue, I predict. Migration is the issue.
A study forecasting global temperatures as a result of climate change has projected that billions will be made to endure “nearly unliveable” heat. Credit: stevanovicigor/Depositphotos
Climate change stands to reshape the world in all kinds of ways, and one of the most profound will be the impact of warmer temperatures on the human population. An international team of researchers casting an eye towards this future has published a study detailing a grim outlook for billions of people, with rapidly rising temperatures to leave them outside the “climate niche” where humans have thrived for thousands of years.
A lot of reports that investigate the oncoming effects of climate change do so with an 2 °C (3.6 °F) or 3 °C (5.4 °F) temperature increase in mind and project how such jumps in global average temperatures over pre-industrial levels could impact the world’s ecosystems, from the oceans to the mountains, and everything in between.
Climate change stands to reshape the world in all kinds of ways, and one of the most profound will be the impact of warmer temperatures on the human population. […]
The thing about life forms is they all mutate, and the simpler they are the quicker the mutation. All life form researchers know this, as do most people, if not in detail. It is, however, apparently above the capacity of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, or rather they have different priorities. Everything that is happening to America was begun by the stress of the Covid-19 virus, but is the result of incompetence, greed, and the belief that you can outsmart facts for short term gain.
In a world of mutating viruses and bacteria, which is inevitable given climate change, to have a healthy society a country must have a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system run not for profit but to foster wellbeing. Our values are screwed up, and it has brought us to this, led by men like these.
A nurse looks at test tubes after taking a blood sample from a patient suffering from Covid 19, in the Covid-19 department at the Bari Polyclinic on May 05, 2020 in Bari, Italy. Credit: Donato Fasano/Getty
A new strain of the novel coronavirus appears to be more contagious than the version that gained footing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
The new strain, dubbed D614G, surfaced in Europe in February before appearing in the east coast of the United States. It has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, according to the report. That fact is raising concerns, not just over the new strain’s infectivity but also because some believe the existence of a secondary strain may make some patients vulnerable to a second infection after surviving a different strain.
Because much existing research was focused on earlier strains, such research may not be applicable to this new strain, Los Alamos scientists warn.
The 33-page report was posted on BioRxiv, and has yet to […]
Stephan: There is a trend that is having a major effect on our society that, I think, is not being seen correctly. Before the digital age and in decline going back through history, communication was to smaller and smaller groups of people. So lies and deliberate disinformation were a more limited variable in shaping society.
But with the digital age, as Fox demonstrates, this has become a major factor. Here is Laura Ingraham propagating a deliberate lie that will put the lives of at least a million people at greater risk.
“Although intuitively I think it probably seemed like social distancing would be necessary, there was no real scientific basis for believing that, since it had never been studied,” Laura Ingraham said.
Americans have widely followed social distancing directives to “flatten the curve” of new coronavirus cases and prevent hospitals from being stretched beyond capacity. In the absence of widespread testing, most Americans have supported such mitigation efforts.
But scattered protests have also captured attention and led pundits like Ingraham and fellow Fox News host Tucker Carlson to call for an end to more statewide shutdowns as U.S. deaths due to the coronavirus top 70,000.
Members of the White House coronavirus task force have encouraged social distancing. President Donald Trump credited nationwide closures with saving “millions of lives” as recently as May 3 in a town hall.
But while it’s difficult to assess the exact impact of social distancing policies so far, experts told us Ingraham’s claim is wrong. There’s plenty of science behind social distancing.
“It’s one of the few tools that we know works in the case of an unknown, novel virus such as this,” said Thomas Novotny, an epidemiologist at San Diego State University.
Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.Studies […]
Stephan: This little personal story may seem sad, but of little importance, in the midst of the crisis the country is facing. However, I see it as much more than that, I think it is telling us something important about a major trend I see developing: the death of local hometown newspapers. Is that really as important as I am saying? I think so. The loss of local press means the loss of local oversight of politicians, local powerbrokers, criminals, and local corruption. It means the things that bind a community together and make it healthy are lost. And local press is going out of business all over America.
But, you say, isn't all that local stuff covered by Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, and all the other social media? I am sorry, no. Gossip is not investigative journalism. A free press is essential to democracy, and along with all our other losses this one will have implications that are hard to predict except to say they will be profound.
Rich Jackson, a 54-year-old journalist who worked as the top editor of The Herald-Times
On Wednesday he was laid off. On Friday he was living in a Motel 6.
Rich Jackson, a 54-year-old journalist who worked as the top editor of The Herald-Times, a Gannett-owned newspaper in Bloomington, Ind., received the bad news in the parking lot next to the paper’s headquarters. He was also told he would have to vacate the apartment in the same building, where he had been living for 10 months.
Unable to go the newsroom, Mr. Jackson started a blog. He called it The Homeless Editor.
“In terms of writing, I always look for key words, and you couldn’t have better than those two,” he said in a phone interview.
His first four posts have gotten 20,000 page views — high figures for a solitary blog. They describe how, as he put it in one entry, “I went from someone to no one in 30 minutes.”
The apartment where he had been living was once reserved for the owner of The Herald-Times. If you stand facing […]
