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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.
This report, in my view, is important for three reasons: First, the livestock industry has been proven to be a major reason climate change is occurring, and nothing is being done. Second, this report shows how vulnerable to corruption the science community has become, and how weak its ethical standards now are. Third, it confirms once again, if yet another confirmation was required, that the United States is a deeply corrupt country, where you can corrupt any institution in our society if you have enough money because greed and profit are the only things that matter in American culture.
Credit: Adobe
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands.
Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion.
In the following 17 years, the report has been scrutinized by researchers, attacked from every angle, and referenced again and again, held up as a clarion call for worldwide veganism on one side, and on the other, a symbol of the climate-hysterical global nanny state bent on stealing everyone’s cheeseburgers.
But as the public has been whipsawed over its findings, new research says it […]
I think Max Tani makes some very good points about what is happening in journalism in the U.S. and I thought it notable that he also cites people who don’t agree with him. Personally, I think his assessments are quite accurate.
There’s too much to read and watch, too many places to read and watch it. It’s enough to distract you from the biggest news in journalism right now: In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America.
A landscape of gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations has been eroded by a confluence of factors — from rising risks of litigation and costs of insurance, which strapped media companies can hardly afford, to social media, which has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.
The result is a thousand stories you’ll never read, and a shrinking number of publications with the resources and guts to confront power.
One recent example illustrates the difficulty of getting even a modestly negative revelation about a popular public figure into print. Last year, freelance reporter John McDermott discovered that Jay Shetty, a massively popular lifestyle podcaster who recently interviewed President Joe Biden, had fudged biographical details about his life. But months after he began his reporting for Esquire, he wondered: Would any outlet publish it?
Esquire lost interest as the piece took on a critical […]
One sees a lot of commentary on the difference between the way men and women see politics. but I think it’s more complicated than most commentators make it seem. Here is a data-based assessment that, in my opinion, makes the right point. “It’s frustrating to say “we don’t know” about something as important as the future of gender politics. But sometimes, “we don’t know” is the only honest answer.”
Credit: Getty
When I was growing up in the 1990s, couples counselor John Gray penned a book on gender relations with an instantly memorable title: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The book argued that men and women have fundamentally different communication styles, which can be major sources of tension in heterosexual relationships. To call it a hit is a massive understatement: Gray’s book has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and was even adapted into a Broadway show (starring Gray) in the late 1990s.
Yet Men Are From Mars’s broad generalizations — “Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished” — haven’t held up. Feminist critics who challenged the book’s simplistic narrative at the time have largelybeenvalidated by subsequent scientific research, which finds that men and women don’t act nearly as differently as stereotypes suggest.
The lesson here is that gender-divide stories are intuitively appealing but awfully easy to overstate. Any new claims that men and women are behaving differently should be approached with caution — a maxim that’s as true in the political world as anywhere else.
I read stories like this one and ask myself, how is it possible we are having a presidential election in 8 months, we have the worst healthcare amongst all developed democracies, and yet we hear not a single word about creating universal birthright single-payer healthcare. We go on year after year with this desperately poor healthcare system that costs more than any other system in the world, and there is no serious discussion about it. Maybe voters just don’t know any better. What do you think?
Robert Morris, CEO of Complete Care
If freestanding emergency centers (FECs) are to survive and help underserved rural communities, they should be allowed to receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, which they cannot currently do, an FEC executive told members of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Monday.
“The model doesn’t work unless we can get Medicare and Medicaid,” Robert Morris, CEO of Complete Care, a company that runs 15 FECs in Texas and Colorado, said during a subcommittee field hearingopens in a new tab or window held at Global Medical Response, a ground and air transportation service provider in Denton, Texas. “But there’s a lot of us in this space that would love to go out to those underserved areas.”
Millions in Uncompensated Care
FECs are one type of rural emergency care provider that has sprung up in the wake of many rural hospital closures. They are state-licensed facilities that offer the same level of care as hospital-based emergency departments, with doctors, nurses, and radiology technologists always on site, Morris, who is also president of the National Association of Freestanding Emergency Centers, said in his written testimony.
“Our facilities provide advanced imaging, laboratory, and […]
I was about to use the JAMA paper but was concerned it was too technical when I found this Hartmann article, which makes the same point on basically the same data, citing the JAMA paper. The sad truth is there are a lot of Handmaidens in the U.S. who vote year after year for the Trump Christofascist Party candidates, even though it oftentimes puts their own life, or the life of their daughters, at risk. I think it is going to take thousands of more female deaths in Red states before the Hand Maids wake up, and I find that very sad.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
It sure looks like Republicans want women to die. Particularly if they’re teenagers and have the temerity to be sexually active.
This is highlighted by what has to qualify as the most shocking scientific study of the year, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network and titled Teen Pregnancy and Risk of Premature Mortality.
The result of the study of over 2.2 million women who experienced teen and pre-teen pregnancies (the youngest in the study gave birth at 9 years of age, although most were older teens) is best summarized by the subhead in the article about it in March 14th’s New York Times:
“A large analysis in Canada finds that teenagers who had babies were twice as likely to die before age 31.”
This is not a statistic you’ll hear on Fox “News” or in rightwing hate media. Instead, they’re cheer-leading for raped little girls to experience “the miracle of birth.”
Leonard Leo is the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Christofasct Party (TCP), and it is amazing to me that the media pays so little attention to him considering what he has accomplished for the christofascists and Trump. Just as Hitler and the Nazis were very clear about what they are trying to do, so the TCP and Trump are quite explicit, and their followers lap it up and ask for more. Listen to any Trump rally and it is very clear.
Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, speaks at its National Lawyers Convention in Washington on Nov. 16, 2017. Credit: Sait Serkan Gurbuz / AP
Conservative Activist and Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo recently outlined his pitch for billionaires on how they can help move the United States government and society to the right.
“It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” Leo said in a new podcast interview, calling on the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts.
“We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society,” Leo said of the Supreme Court. “And I think we should take full advantage of it.”
The co-chair of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, Leo is best known as the man who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority, in his role as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser. Leo’s dark money network, which received a historic $1.6 billion infusion in 2021, additionally helps bring cases before the high court, influence which cases the justices consider, […]
The reality that there are already people who are richer than some countries, and they are getting still richer is a sign of how dysfunctional our national economy has become. This all happened because over and over the Trump Chritofascist Party (the former Republican Party) has cut taxes for the rich and rigged the tax system to favor them. On top of that the Supreme Court fascists legalized the bribery of politicians. These changes are the source of most of the problems the United States faces.
Illustration: Elia Barbieri / The Guardian
At the beginning of each year, the world’s corporate and political elite gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to pat each other on the back, attend seminars on “the fourth Industrial Revolution” – whatever that might be – and generally mull over the state of the world. Rarely is so much wealth to be found in so few conference rooms. And each year, Oxfam, the global development charity, takes the opportunity to run the numbers on the state of global inequality. Oxfam’s findings are often eye-catching, but this year especially so.
The wealth of the five richest people in the world, they found, has more than doubled, from $405bn (£320bn) in 2020 to $869bn in late 2023. That’s an increase of about $14m an hour, which is not bad going by anyone’s reckoning. Perhaps more strikingly, Oxfam calculates that on current trends the world is due to welcome its first dollar trillionaire within a decade. Elon Musk, the richest person at the time of writing, is worth about a fifth of that, at $210bn.
It may of course take longer than Oxfam predicts, but the global trends are […]
Here is a writer in the U.K. saying what I have been telling you for 20 years. I take this as a sign of the general awakening by journalists that all life is interconnected and interdependent. I did a media interview today, with Jeff Lippman, and most of the questions he asked me in essence dealt with this same realization. It is my view what has created the Trump Christofascist Party base is the precognitive but unconscious fear of what climate change is going to do to civilization.
“The health of humans, animals and our environment are woven together in a bond that is inextricable, yet fragile.” Credit: Surachet1 / iStock)
If our planet were a patient, it would be admitted to intensive care. Its vital signs are alarming.
It is running a fever, with each of the last nine months the hottest on record, as we hurtle towards the 1.5 degree threshold.
Its lung capacity is compromised, with the destruction of forests that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
And many of the earth’s water sources – its lifeblood – are contaminated.
Most concerning of all, its condition is deteriorating rapidly.
Is it any wonder, then, that human health is suffering, when the health of the planet on which we depend is in peril?
The health of humans, animals and our environment are woven together in a bond that is inextricable, yet fragile. We belong to the same unique, finely balanced ecosystem.
This is not a new realisation. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote in the 5th century BCE that, “The physician treats, but nature heals.”
We are now re-learning what humans have always known, but which, since the industrial revolution, we have forgotten or ignored – that […]
