The Schwartzreport by Stephan A. Schwartz

Friday, September 30th, 2016

An Open Letter Regarding Climate Change From Concerned Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

Benjamin D. Santer, Member, National Academy of Sciences, Kerry A. Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George B. Field, Harvard University, Ray Weymann, Carnegie Institution for Science Emeritus - Concerned Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

I completely agree with this Open Letter. This is what is at stake in this election, and I implore you to get this across to everyone you know. We are way past partisan politics. This is about the survival of civilization; the relevant decisions and the course we chart will happen in the next administration.

Unless we choose wisely we could be steering into a kind of dystopian new dark ages.

Donald Trump must not become President, and the Senate must switch to Democratic majority.

This will assure a Supreme Court that will interpret laws compassionately made and signed in a compassionate manner. It is the only way we are going to get through.

On September 20, 2016, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates, published an open letter to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change. The letter warns that the consequences of opting out of the Paris agreement would be severe and long-lasting for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

A full list of signers follows the text of the letter.

Human-caused climate change is not a belief, a hoax, or a conspiracy. It is a physical reality. Fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution. But the burning of oil, coal, and gas also caused most of the historical increase in atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This increase in greenhouse gases is changing Earth’s climate.

Our fingerprints on the climate system are visible everywhere. They are seen in warming of the oceans, the land surface, and the lower atmosphere. …

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Friday, September 30th, 2016

Across US, police officers abuse confidential databases

SADIE GURMAN and ERIC TUCKER - Associated Press

This story about the police misusing confidential data about individuals for personal reasons was so predictable I am amazed anyone is surprised. This was one of my major reasons for opposing the suspension of personal privacy by the government. As sure as the Sun comes up you knew police were going to abuse this data. But apparently people are surprised. Here’s the story.

Police computer center
Credit: Eric Paul Zamora

DENVER — Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Criminal-history and driver databases give officers critical information about people they encounter on the job. But the AP’s review shows how those systems also can be exploited by officers who, motivated by romantic quarrels, personal conflicts or voyeuristic curiosity, sidestep policies and sometimes the law by snooping. In the most egregious cases, officers have used information to stalk or harass, or have tampered with or sold records they obtained.

No single agency tracks how often the abuse happens nationwide, and record-keeping inconsistencies make it impossible to know how many violations occur.

But the AP, through records requests to state agencies and big-city …

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Friday, September 30th, 2016

New jobs report is an utter disaster for Kansas and Brownback

Yael T. Abouhalkah - Kansas City Star

Here from the most prominent paper in Kansas is the story of Governor Sam Brownback, his merrymen in the legislature, and their fantasies about economics and governance. I did an initial report when the Kansas economic data came out, and I have held on to this report to see if any correctives emerged. They have not, and the data is dispositive.

Republican economics are nonsense. Paul Ryan’s budget fantasies are nonsense. This is the proof. Brownback is a hardcore ideologue, and he did what he was convinced would work; I don’t think anyone should question his conviction he was right; that he knew the way . He didn’t and as the accurate data reveals his policies don’t work. Really don’t work.

Kansas Republican Governor Sam Brownback
Credit: Thad Allton/AP|

The new July jobs report released Friday is an utter disaster for Kansans and embattled Gov. Sam Brownback.

Here are the lowlights.

▪ The state lost 5,600 jobs from June to July.

▪ The unemployment rate jumped to 4.1 percent from 3.8 percent in June.

▪ Over the last year, Kansas has actually shed 4,500 jobs.

▪ The Sunflower State’s “growth” rate over that 12 months is a minus 0.3 percent — 5th worst in the nation. Only Wyoming, North Dakota, Louisiana and Oklahoma were behind Kansas.

▪ Kansas had employment of 1,395,700 in July 2016 — or a stunning 600 fewer jobs than when Brownback’s second term started way back in January 2015.

▪ Finally, Kansas is nowhere close to adding the 2,000 jobs a month that Brownback had pledged during his re-election campaign in 2014.

All of this is the …

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Friday, September 30th, 2016

Texas State Prisons: You Can’t Read The Color Purple but Mein Kampf Is Fine

- Houston Press

I have lived on both coasts and in the middle, and I spent four years criss-crossing, North America in a Bluebird Wanderlodge. I have spent time in every state in the Union and it has taught me states have very different characters; and there are some that seem notably odd to me. Texas is one them. It is a state in love with punishment, and incarceration. But then there is this.

You can get “Mein Kampf” with Texas Department of Criminal Justice blessings, but Thomas More’s “Utopia” has been banned.
Credit: Gwyndion Williams

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has steadily been banning books for decades, but the latest decision, to keep the book Wolf Boys out of state prison circulation because of a single page the TDCJ found offensive, has caused a lot of double takes.

This month, the TDCJ powers-that-be looked over the book by Dan Slater, which tells the story of two teenagers who end up joining the Zetas cartel and then land in state prison, right here in Texas. Any book not included on the list of approved reading material gets kicked to this committee, and if the committee finds the book problematic it is banned, and that’s that.

This time, the committee opted to keep the book out because of two sentences:

“Mario purchased pickup trucks …

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Thursday, September 29th, 2016

New Report: Problem Care Harms Almost One-Third of Rehab Hospital Patients

Marshall Allen - ProPublica

Nearly One-third — 29 Per cent — of patients who receive Re-hab treatment suffer harm from their treatment. I doubt that many of us knew that, but that is the conclusion of a recent government report. And it reveals what all previous reports have shown: America’s Illness Profit System is a failure. The U.S. system for providing healthcare is a grotesque parody of what healthcare should be because, like everything us in our culture, it is run to make profit not actually accomplish its ostensible purpose.

It’s not that individual nurses, doctors and therapists in the system don’t want to do the right thing, it is that they are thwarted by the demand that there be profit above any other consideration. Here is the latest bad news.

Rehabilitation treatment Credit: www.covenantcare.com

Patients may go to rehabilitation hospitals to recover from a stroke, injury, or recent surgery. But sometimes the care makes things worse. In a government report published Thursday, 29 percent of patients in rehab facilities suffered a medication error, bedsore, infection or some other type of harm as a result of the care they received.

Doctors who reviewed cases from a broad sampling of rehab facilities say that almost half of the 158 incidents they spotted among 417 patients were clearly or likely preventable.

“This is the latest study over a long time period now that says we still have high rates of harm,” says Dr. David Classen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who developed the analytic tool used in the report to identify the harm to patients.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we say we have made improvement,” …

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Thursday, September 29th, 2016

The Conservation Crisis No One Is Talking About

John R. Platt - takepart

Do you think much about sand? I mean other than thinking about going to the beach to hang out? Probably not. Few people do.

But the world is headed to a major sand crisis, an environmental catastrophe that is occurring almost invisibly. The media doesn’t even seem to know about it, and you certainly won’t hear any politician talking about it. But it is going to affect your life big time — another self-inflicted wound. Here’s the story, and I will bet not even many of my readers will read it. That’s how invisible it is.

A loader dumps sand into magnetized black sand mining equipment along the shore of San Vicente, Ilocos Sur province, in the northern Philippines.
Credit: Erik De Castro/Reuters

Beaches around the world are disappearing.

No, the cause isn’t sea-level rise, at least not this time. It’s a little-known but enormous industry called sand mining, which every year sucks up billions of tons of sand from beaches, ocean floors, and rivers to make everything from concrete to microchips to toothpaste.
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In the process, conservationists warn, the sand mining industry is damaging ecosystems, changing coastal water flows, and making beaches and communities less resilient to storm surges and floods as climate change accelerates.

“Sand is actually the second-most-used natural resource on Earth, behind water,” said Claire Le Guern Lytle, general director of the Santa Aguila Foundation, which was founded in 2009 to focus on coastal preservation. “It’s a finite resource, and it’s …