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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.
Lauren Kaori Gurley, Labor Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
As this article reports, “At least 16 states have one or more bills to weaken their child labor laws and at least 13 are seeking to strengthen them, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.” By any social outcome measure I can find and research overall as a country we are a society whose wellbeing is in decline. Child labor. Who could have imagined that in the second decade of the 21st century we would be talking about whether it was legal for 14-year-olds back in the labor force?
As child labor violations soar across the country, dozens of states are ramping up efforts to update child labor laws — with widespread efforts to weaken laws, but some to bolster them as well.
Labor experts attribute the spike in child labor violations, which have tripled over the past 10 years according to a Post analysis, to a tight labor market that has prompted employers to hire more teens, as well as migrant children arriving from Latin America. In 2023, teens aged 16 to 19 were working or looking for work at the highest annual rate since 2009, according to Labor Department data.
That’s led to the largest effort in years to change the patchwork of state laws that regulate child labor, […]
Here is an excellent assessment of how AI is changing our culture and our economy. I agree with the analysis, but the thing that is missing in the description of the solution, in my opinion is that the key to dealing with AI is that the highest social priority must be the compassionate life-affirming fostering of wellbeing of the entirety of Earth’s matrix of consciousness. The reason the United States is in such serious decline socially is because we have failed to recognize this.
Credit: Ayo Walker / truthout
In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws.
From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI tools that tech companies say will supposedly benefit all of us. In a recent statement to legislative bodies, OpenAI claimed that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” It remains to be seen if courts will agree, but it’s not looking good for content creators. In February, a California court dismissed large portions of a case brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors.
Some of these cases may reveal ongoing negotiations, as some companies figure out how to pressure others into sharing a piece of the AI pie. Publisher Axel Springer and the social media platform Reddit, […]
If you read me regularly you know that I have been calling the merging of White evangelical christianity and what used to be the Republican Party, christofascism. I don’t capitalize the C because this cult may use the language of the Bible but they have nothing to do with Jesus’ teaching or the values of Christianity. This is a cohort defined by their anger, White racism, resentment, sense of self-righteousness, victimization, and their worship of criminal Trump. Not the brightest group as proven by the fact that they believe what Trump vomits out every day, and think he actually gives a damn about them.
Long known for his improvised and volatile stage performances, former President Donald J. Trump now tends to finish his rallies on a solemn note.
Soft, reflective music fills the venue as a hush falls over the crowd. Mr. Trump’s tone turns reverent and somber, prompting some supporters to bow their heads or close their eyes. Others raise open palms in the air or murmur as if in prayer.
In this moment, Mr. Trump’s audience is his congregation, and the former president their pastor as he delivers a roughly 15-minute finale that evokes an evangelical altar call, the emotional tradition that concludes some Christian services in which attendees come forward to commit to their savior.
“The great silent majority is rising like never before and under our leadership,” he recites from a teleprompter in a typical version of the script. “We will pray to God for our strength and for our liberty. We will pray for God and we will pray with God. We are one movement, one people, one family and one glorious nation under God.”
Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is a nightmare of stupidity, willful ignorance, and conspiracy delusions. I hope no SR reader is going to make the mistake of voting for this man or his VP mate Nicole Shanahan. We have a two-party system, voting for a third-party candidate in this case is really a vote for Trump. But apart from that Kennedy’s and Shanahan’s anti-vaxxerism in conjunction with criminal Trump’s madness is responsible for the death of a million people, and Shanahan’s anti-IVF nonsense is just more Earth II madness. These are dangerous people.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate has been a harsh critic of in vitro fertilization, while funding alternative research on extending women’s reproductive years.
Nicole Shanahan has for years denounced IVF — calling it “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”
At the same time, she has also been a vocal proponent of and financial backer for unconventional research into the possibility of helping women having children into their 50s and exploring no-cost interventions to help women conceive, such as exposure to sunlight.
“I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health. I would love to fund something like that,” Shanahan said to a 2023 panel with the National Academy of Medicine, a group to which she said she had previously donated $100 million. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Bia-Echo’s donation amounted to $150,000.
The statement was met with chuckles, “Yeah, let’s do it,” she added. “I just have an intuition that could be interesting and maybe work.”
As a candidate, her criticisms of IVF have taken on heightened importance following an Alabama Supreme Court’s […]
I have been warning SR readers for over a decade of what is coming about climate change and the migrations it is going to cause so you can prepare and make prudent decisions about your own future. (See SR archive, and search on “migration”) Now others, like this article, are taking up this same warning. I urge you to do some research on what the projections are for your region, and when something is likely to happen.
Credit: Adobe
Just months after the Carr and Mendocino Complex fires ripped through nearly 700,000 acres of northern California in 2018, the wind-driven Camp Fire erupted near Chico. The fire scorched through the abnormally dry vegetation, blazing and spreading rapidly, and at one time burned some 10,000 acres in just 90 minutes. It caught the residents of the cozy town of Paradise, nestled in the western Sierra Nevada forests, completely by surprise. The conflagration quickly consumed the entire town, destroying everything and killing 85 people.
Most of the rest of the 26,000 residents fled, and survivors relocated, mostly to California’s Central Valley. Around a quarter have returned to rebuild their homes and communities, despite the fire risks, but many of Paradise’s diaspora cannot or do not want to attempt doing so. Now that they’ve been uprooted, they’re moving on with their lives elsewhere.
Such a scenario is a sign of what’s to come for a growing swath of Americans in the climate-change era, Abrahm Lustgarten argues in “On the Move: […]
Yet another story of the United States failing to educate its young. Fifty-four percent of us can’t read past 6th grade level as it stands now. Forty-three percent can’t read past 5th grade level. Our public schools are being deliberately sabotaged by what was once the Republican Party, and this is the latest report on what is going on with college applications. What all of this is telling anyone who will listen is that in the near future Americans will be the most poorly educated of the developed democracies, if we are still even a democracy. By every social data outcome measure I can find the United States is a country in a major decline. Few in politics will talk about it, corporate media rarely covers it, but that is what is happening.
Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Harold M. Lambert / Getty.
For years, Senator Lamar Alexander was known for theatrically unfurling a paper document so long that he could hold it above his head and still see it drag along the chamber floor. It was the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, a form that every college student and their family must complete to be eligible for federal grants and student loans. Detractors argued that its length (more than 100 questions) and complexity (experts joked that you needed a Ph.D. to complete it) deterred students from getting aid and attending college. In December 2020, on the eve of Alexander’s retirement, Congress finally passed legislation to simplify the form, with implementation ultimately scheduled for the high-school class of 2024. It was a rare win for bipartisan, commonsense governance: less paperwork, more kids going to college.
That was the idea, anyway. In practice, seemingly every phase of the implementation has gone wrong; an ostensible process of simplification has […]
Members of Congress are leaving, now staff are talking about leaving. How much clearer does it have to get that the U.S. Congress is not functioning properly and our democracy is deteriorating? What do you think will happen if criminal Trump is elected?
House Speaker Mike Johnson on February 1, 2024 Credit: Creative Commons
The wave of retirement announcements and sudden resignations by members of the 118th Congress may soon be spreading to lawmakers’ staff as well.
Senior-level aides on both sides of the aisle are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ossified, hyper-partisan climate in Washington, DC, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Post’s Paul Kane attributed staffers’ disgust with working on Congress to not just “pandemic fallout, ranging from partisan battles over mask mandates to the long closure of the buildings to the public,” but also “the ongoing toxicity since the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.”
“Congress is broken,” the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) stated in its 2024 “State of the Congress” report. The report noted that nearly half of senior aides in both chambers of Congress are considering leaving their jobs because of “heated rhetoric from the other party.”
“Only 12% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans agreed that ‘Congress is currently functioning […]
Erin Reed , Commentator - Erin In The Morning. / truthout
Stephan:
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are so poorly governed that if you look at their social outcome data, from healthcare to education it is clear they are basically third-world countries. What is even sadder is how filled with hate and White racism they are, as this article describes. They remind me of South Africa during the apartheid period of its history. This is their latest nastiness, and it is spreading to other TCP-dominated states.
Opponents of several bills targeting transgender youth attend a rally at the Alabama State House to draw attention to anti-transgender legislation on March 30, 2021, in Montgomery, Alabama. Credit: Julie Bennett / Getty
The pace of anti-transgender legislation has slowed in recent weeks, with several states, known for previously targeting transgender individuals, failing to pass any such laws. However, a different dynamic is emerging across the Gulf South, where three states are advancing bills that would cease the legal recognition of transgender individuals, potentially having significant repercussions for their trans residents. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are introducing bills to define sex in a manner that excludes transgender individuals, potentially affecting birth certificates, driver’s licenses, bathroom access, and more.
The bills, dubbed the “Women’s Bills of Rights” by their supporters, fall far short of actually protecting women’s rights. They fail to protect access to birth control or abortion, do not ensure equitable pay, neither allocate funds for nor promote women’s athletics, and lack any provisions designed to curb violence against women. […]
