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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: 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 the newspaper […]
Stephan: We are literally watching our country come apart. Today, not for the first time, but establishing it as a trend, I heard the president and other Republicans start to layout two arguments. First, we live with 33,000 gun deaths a year and have for decades, but we haven't changed the 2nd Amendment. Second, Americans are soldiers in what amounts to a war. There will be casualties. There will be deaths, as there are in any war. Do you think of your granny, living in a nursing home, as a soldier who must be prepared to give up their life in the service of the economy? Probably not. But that is the way Trump looks at her.
All of this is being done to improve Trump's re-election chances, and smokescreen the reality which is: We are living through a disaster being created mostly not by Covid-19 but by the incompetence, willful ignorance, and greed of Trump and those around him. 3,000 deads a day. Suck it up, be a patriot they are telling the Trumpers.
I even saw a report that in the Trumper quarter many consider the wearing of masks "unmanly." That was the secret signal, the dog whistle, Trump sent by going to a mask factory not wearing a mask. Nor did anyone around him.
As Covid-19 moves into rural America, the gross inadequacy of the illness profit system in those unprofitable low population areas is going to become very obvious. I say again: We have 4.25% of the world's population but 32% of world's coronavirus cases. And that's just the ones we know about. Why isn't everyone talking about this? Trump, McConnell, all the Republicans are trying an Orwellian gaslight of the whole pandemic. You can watch it happen. The question is going to be will people believe it?
Also, as a result of what the Trump administration has done the geopolitics of the world has also experienced a transformational crisis. For your lifetime and mine, America was the geopolitical leader. Even in the Cold War everyone really understood that the world leader was the United States. That is no longer true. In three years, Trump has so severely damaged the way America is perceived that it may not be possible to fully repair it. Trump's withdrawal from the WHO is just the latest example of these self-inflicted wounds.
A broad coalition of US health systems has mobilized to ramp up coronavirus testing in a national effort on a scale not seen since the second world war. But declarations of false victory by the Trump administration and a vacuum of federal leadership have undermined the endeavor, leading experts to warn that reopening the US could result in a disaster.
Interviews with agents on the frontlines of the coronavirus battle – lab directors, chemists, manufacturers, epidemiologists, academics and technologists – reveal as diverse an application of the legendary American ingenuity as the century has seen.
Test kit manufacturers are running production lines around the clock to triple their output, and triple it again. A private healthcare institute in California has constructed a mega-lab to process thousands of tests daily and deliver the results by text message. In smaller labs across the country, microbiologists improvise each day to fill unpredictable supply chain gaps that might leave them without swabs one day, and without crucial chemicals the next.
Stephan: I don't agree with the writer's conclusions as to how this will come out. We have different views about what lowering nuclear weapons in Europe would mean. But I am running it because it illustrates the point I made in my comment with the first story about geopolitical change.
BERLIN — Just days before Germany is set to celebrate the anniversary of its “liberation” from Nazi rule, leading members of the governing Social Democrats are demanding that the country be freed from what they consider another scourge — American nuclear weapons.
“Nuclear weapons on German territory do not heighten our security, just the opposite,” Rolf Mützenich, the leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) in the German parliament said in an interview with newspaper Tagesspiegel published on Sunday. “The time has come for Germany to rule out a future stationing.”
Though not everyone in the SPD’s top ranks shares his views, Mützenich quickly won backing from co-SPD leader Saskia Esken.
“Whoever thinks that glasnost and perestroika were made possible by the West’s nuclear deterrent missed something,” she tweeted. “Atomic weaponry on German soil, on German airplanes, is neither an end to itself nor desirable, not to mention very expensive.”
The SPD leadership’s demands reopen an old debate in Germany about whether to remain under the protective nuclear umbrella the U.S. has held over the country since the 1950s. On the left, many see the weapons as an unnecessary provocation toward Russia. Those tensions went on the boil in […]
Stephan: This story is getting only modest coverage but it is, in fact, a Constitutional crisis of historical significance. Donald Trump and the Republicans demonstrate yet again that they do not like democracy. How much clearer than this does it need to be shown?
US President Donald Trump and other members of the task force listen as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at the White House . Credit: Jim Watson/AFP / Getty
The White House this week blocked all members of the coronavirus task force from testifying to Congress without the express permission of President Donald Trump’s new chief of staff.
The White House told congressional committees that no task force member can accept an invitation to testify without approval from chief of staff Mark Meadows after it blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, from testifying before a House committee, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The memo also limits the number of hearings officials at government agencies can attend, arguing that the “demands on agencies’ staff and resources are extraordinary in this current crisis.”
“Agencies must maximize their resources for COVID-19 response efforts and treat hearing requests accordingly,” the memo said. “Given these competing demands in these unprecedented times, it is […]
Kristian S. Blickle, - Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Stephan: This is what concerns me. I am just publishing the abstract, I urge you to click through and download the .pdf
White Militia and Neo-Nazis Credit: Mockingbird Paper
ABSTRACT
We merge several historical data sets from Germany to show that influenza mortality in 1918-1920 is correlated with societal changes, as measured by municipal spending and city-level extremist voting, in the subsequent decade. First, influenza deaths are associated with lower per capita spending, especially on services consumed by the young. Second, influenza deaths are correlated with the share of votes received by extremist parties in 1932 and 1933. Our election results are robust to controlling for city spending, demographics, war-related population changes, city-level wages, and regional unemployment, and to instrumenting influenza mortality. We conjecture that our findings may be the consequence of long-term societal changes brought about by a pandemic. Key words: influenza, pandemic, municipal spending, voter extremism
Stephan: We are now watching the Coronavirus move into a new phase where it is revealing the stupidity and incompetence of various organizations and the abject failure of Trump and his administration. Religious groups who thought Covid-19 was a hoax and did not practice self-separation are now dying from willful ignorance. Nursing homes, prison, jails, and meatpacking plants, and the country towns in Red states, are now the hot spots for the virus. Why? Because of greed, stupidity, and incompetence.
The American population constitutes about 4.25% of the world's population. And yet we have one-third (32%) of the world's Covid-19 cases. Why is that? Why does the richest country in the world have the worst pandemic figures? Because Trump and his administration are incompetent at a historic level. The truth is, and because of all the data I don't think this can be denied, Trump and his people don't actually care about the virus; they only care about profit. Their concerns about opening up businesses are about profit. The stimulus package is actually a compensation program for the rich.
The view of the rich seems to be: So what if a bunch of peasants die; there are too many of them anyway. We have access to testing and the money to isolate ourselves in luxury. And our reserves of wealth are such that the pandemic has no real effect on our lives.
Fundamentalist demonstrators
Countless non-fundamentalist churches in the United States, from Catholic to Lutheran and Episcopalian, have embraced social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic and temporarily moved their activities online. But many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have been irresponsibly downplaying the dangers of COVID-19 and doing so with deadly results: journalist Alex Woodward, in the U.K.-based Independent, reports that the pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 30 pastors in the Bible Belt.
“Dozens of pastors across the Bible Belt have succumbed to coronavirus after churches and televangelists played down the pandemic and actively encouraged churchgoers to flout self-distancing guidelines,” Woodward reports. “As many as 30 church leaders from the nation’s largest African-American Pentecostal denomination have now been confirmed to have died in the outbreak, as members defied public health warnings to avoid large gatherings to prevent transmitting the virus.”
Within Christianity, there are major differences between non-fundamentalist Mainline Protestant denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and fundamentalist Pentecostals. And Woodward, in The Independent, discusses the Pentecostals who have openly defied social distancing.
Stephan: Yet another anti-life program going on beneath the media's single focus on the pandemic. This is how corporate fascists are using willfully ignorant and White racist peasants for their own purposes. Here is a very good assessment of what they are doing.
Demonstrators in Michigan last month. Credit: Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal/Associated Press
America’s extremists are attempting to turn the coronavirus pandemic into a potent recruiting tool both in the deep corners of the internet and on the streets of state capitals by twisting the public health crisis to bolster their white supremacist, anti-government agenda.LIVE COVERAGEGet live updates and the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.
Although the protests that have broken out across the country have drawn out a wide variety of people pressing to lift stay-at-home orders, the presence of extremists cannot be missed, with their anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic signs and coded messages aimed at inspiring the faithful, say those who track such movements.
April is typically a busy month for white supremacists. There is Hitler’s birthday, which they contort into a celebration. There is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the domestic attack 25 years ago that killed 168 people and still serves as a rallying call for new extremist recruits.
But this April, something else overshadowed those chilling milestones. It was the coronavirus, […]
