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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.
Laura Meckler, Hannah Natanson, John D. Harden, Reporters - Microsoft Start
Stephan:
When you breed hate you get hate crimes, and that is exactly what is happening to LGBTQ kids where the Trump christofascist Party (TCP) controls the state government. This is the exact opposite of government designed to foster wellbeing. This is part of the Great Schism Trend, and I believe we are going to see families with LGBTQ kids moving from these Red states. How big is this population: Here is what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has to say:
Number and percentage of students, by sexual identity — Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, 2021
Site
Sexual identity
Heterosexual (straight)
Gay or lesbian
Bisexual
Other/Questioning
No.
%
CI*
No.
%
CI
No.
%
CI
No.
%
CI
National survey
Total
12,421
74.2
(72.4–75.9)
520
3.2
(2.7–3.7)
1,848
11.9
(10.9–12.9)
1,482
9.0
(8.0–10.0)
Male
7,358
87.3
(85.8–88.7)
195
2.4
(1.9–3.1)
356
4.0
(3.2–5.1)
333
3.7
(3.1–4.3)
Female
4,992
61.6
(59.1–64.0)
298
3.7
(3.0–4.5)
1,449
20.0
(18.5–21.6)
1,055
13.7
(12.3–15.3)
LGBTQ students Credit: USA Today
School hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people have sharply risen in recent years, climbing fastest in states that have passed laws restricting LGBTQ student rights and education, a Washington Post analysis of FBI data finds.
In states with restrictive laws, the number of hate crimes on K-12 campuses has more than quadrupled since the onset of a divisive culture war that has often centered on the rights of LGBTQ+ youth.
At the same time, calls to LGBTQ+ youth crisis hotlines have exploded, with some advocates drawing a connection between the spike in bullying and hate crimes, and the political climate.
LGBTQ+ students have long dealt with bullying and harassment at school, but some students are feeling particularly vulnerable due to the wave of legislation. They are also on edge following the death of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teenager who died after a fight in their Oklahoma public school bathroom.
That’s the case for Carden, a transgender 17-year-old. He argues that politicians’ anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has shaped the views of adults in the conservative Virginia county where he […]
David Badash, Senior Editor - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
Trump and his Trump christofascist Party (TCP) do not like public education, and are openly making it clear if Americans elect them they are going to gut the system that probably educated you. They don’t want education. Like Hitler and the Nazis they want indoctrination not fact-based education. Don’t say you haven’t been warned about their intentions. They also want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s the TCP’s agenda, is that what you want?
In two separate videos on Trump’s little-noticed “Agenda 47” website, the ex-president details his vision to take millions of dollars away from the endowments of private colleges and universities, through lawsuits and fines, as retribution for some students he suggests embraced Hamas after it attacked Israel. Those millions of dollars would be used to create an entire new federal government university system which, Trump vows, would be entirely non-political: no “wokeness” would be allowed.
Trump claimed colleges and universities are “turning our students into communists, terrorists, and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can’t let this happen. It’s time to offer something dramatically different. Under the plan I’m announcing today we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy.”
Trump also announced plans to entirely eliminate the U.S. Dept. of Education, allowing states to keep those funds so they can determine what and how children should be taught.
“Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual and political material, which is what we’re doing now, our schools […]
Andrea Petersen, Reporter - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
A large percentage of Americans have terrible diets because they eat ultra-processed foods, as described in this report. If you do this, please stop. This is one of the reasons Americans have such poor health, are so obese, and have a life expectancy five years shorter than most Europeans and the Japanese.
Illustration by Elena Scott / The Wall Street Journal
Ultra-processed foods may not only affect our bodies, but our brains too.
New research suggests links between ultra-processed foods—such as chips, many cereals and most packaged snacks at the grocery store—and changes in the way we learn, remember and feel. These foods can act like addictive substances, researchers say, and some scientists are proposing a new mental-health condition called “ultra-processed food use disorder.” Diets filled with such foods may raise the risk of mental health and sleep problems.
The science is still early and researchers say there is a lot they don’t know. Not all ultra-processed foods are equal, some scientists say, adding that some might be good for you. A diet high in ultra-processed foods has been linked with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease, but researchers are still figuring out exactly why, beyond calorie counts and nutrient composition.
Makers of foods such as processed meats and muffins defend their products, and note that there isn’t a consistent, universally accepted definition of ultra-processed food.
Adult children are still being supported in some way by their parents. And so many, 50 per cent as reported in this article. It is a major change in our culture.
AdultChildren supported by their parents. Credit: Scary Mommy
The study – conducted by Savings.com – found that young, working-class Americans were not substantially benefiting from the recovery of the country’s economy, as “evidenced by high employment, falling inflation, and economic growth”. That has forced many of them to continue to rely on their parents to help cover costs of living.
The average age of adults receiving financial help from their parents – sometimes at the risk of the parents’ retirement security – was 22, according to the study. And while parents surveyed in the study on average said their adult children should become financially independent by 25, many were supporting those children beyond that milestone.
Of parents providing support, 21% were helping millennials (age 28-43) or members of gen X (age 44-59). Millennials and gen X adult children were on average given between $907 and $960 each month by their parents.
Gen Z adults (between 18 and 27) were getting more help from their mothers and fathers, averaging about $1,515 monthly.
I have been writing about the failure of America’s illness profit system for over 30 years, and it has been getting worse and worse as the years have gone by. The United States has the worst healthcare amongst developed democracies as factually demonstrated by the worse factual outcome data. Highest maternal mortality, highest infant mortality, lowest rank in healthcare systems, and on and on. Here is some current to the day facts about how bad our healthcare system is. The question is why does America have such poor healthcare? The answer, of course, is the same thing that afflicts all American society. U.S. healthcare is not a system designed to foster wellbeing; it is all about maximizing profit. So then, one has to ask why can’t the Congress create universal birthright single-payer healthcare like the other developed democracies. The answer, once again, is the corruption of the Congress. Corporations involved with healthcare pour hundreds of millions of legalized graft into the pockets of politicians, particularly, but not only, TCP politicians.
Credit: Adobe
The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing.
Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.
This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare […]
Fred Schulte, - MedPage Today / Kaiser Family Foundation
Stephan:
It isn’t just that we are on the verge of ceasing to be a democracy. The fundamental problem in the American culture is that integrity and honesty are no longer considered priorities, and our politics and the illness profit system are perhaps the greatest examples of what we have become.
A Maryland firm that oversees the nation’s largest independent network of primary care medical practices is facing a whistleblower lawsuit alleging it cheated Medicare out of millions of dollars using billing software “rigged” to make patients appear sicker than they were.
The civil suit alleges that Aledade’s billing apps and other software and guidance provided to doctors improperly boosted revenues by adding overstated medical diagnoses to patients’ electronic medical records.
“Aledade did whatever it took to make patients appear sicker than they were,” according to the suit.
For example, the suit alleges that Aledade “conflated” anxiety into depression, which could boost payments by $3,300 a year per patient. And Aledade decided that patients over age 65 who said they had more than one drink per day had substance use issues, which could bring in $3,680 extra per patient, the suit says.
The whistleblower case was filed by Khushwinder Singh, MD, in federal court in Seattle in 2021 but remained under seal until January of this year. Singh, a “senior medical director of risk and wellness product” at Aledade from […]
Steven Lee Myers, Misinformation Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan:
It is becoming harder and harder for me to do SR because of the proliferation of misinformation sites put up by TCPs and Russians. I have actually visited some of the sites listed in this article, and I have to double and triple-check everything to make sure what I am publishing in SR is fact-based. Because most people don’t make such an effort I think the weaponization of lies (see the SR archive and search on “weaponization of lies”) is going to seriously distort our election. I doubt our corrupt Congress and Supreme Court will do anything to counteract what is happening. The simple answer is vote only for Democrats if you want to preserve our democracy. After the election, we are going to have to create a citizens’ movement demanding what is posted as news must be objectively verifiable as a fact. We have to make honesty, and the fostering of wellbeing our national priority. The alternative is you will live in a country like Russia or Hungary.
The Miami Chronicle’s website, which mimics an actual news site to push Russia propaganda, first appeared on Feb. 26.
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
I realized tonight as I was doing the research and writing for SR something that I had not fully comprehended: The Great Schism Trend is reaching its crescendo, and we are in the midst of a civil war. One-third of Americans mostly low-income, low education resentful angry Whites, with some Blacks and Latinos financed by White oligarchs want a christofascist authoritarian nation ruled by what they think of as “Christians”, and controlled by the ultra-wealthy Whites who funding the TCP. The low income, low education Whites have armed and are being trained for violence in militias, Proudboys, etc.. They think they will win what they plan to be America’s last democratic election. They want the United States to become something like Hungary. That’s why the Christian Nationalists were meeting with Viktor Orban. The other two-thirds of Americans are mostly asleep to what is really going on. They think this is just another election. It is not. If the TCPs lose and the Democrats win, and I will certainly do everything I can to make that happen, I fear we are going to see civil violence increase, and that it will become a large issue in Biden’s last term.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks at CPAC in Dallas, Aug. 4, 2022. Credit: LM Otero / AP
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was in Washington DC on Thursday. But the controversial autocrat wasn’t making an official state visit. Indeed, President Joe Biden had intentionally declinedto extend a White House invitation to a man who has pursued a vision of “illiberal democracy” and cracked down on press freedom since taking power in 2010. Instead, Orbán was in town to participate in a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, a Christian conservative think-tank.
The authoritarian leader was introduced by failed GOP presidential candidate and aspiring authoritarian Vivek Ramaswamy, who has become a regular at the Hungarian embassy in DC over the past year. Orbán posted a slick video of his Washington visit on social media, including a clip of Heritage president Kevin Roberts gushing that Orbán has “a lot of fans here in the United States. You have a lot of people who are intrigued by policies you enacted.”
According to information distributed by the prime minister’s press office to
