Capitalism, a story of wolves & sheep

"We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps" | Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis

"We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.

"Capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much
as a wolf cares about a lamb’s.
But democratise our economy
and a better world is within our grasp"

What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not primarily to meet human needs or to achieve social progress, much less to deliver on any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is the capitalist law of value. And to maximise profits, capital requires perpetual growth – ever increasing aggregate production, regardless of whether it is necessary or harmful."

Continue reading the article with this 'shared' link   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/capitalist-model-climate-growth-capitalism-species-humanity?CMP=share_btn_url 

End to homelessness possible but not with this administration

"'Deeply illogical': this man's life work could end homelessness – and Trump is doing all he can to stop it "

After four decades of research and over a
decade of federal support, Housing First’s
Sam Tsemberis is ‘back to being an outlaw’ in the US

"Now in his fourth decade of spreading the word across most of the world’s continents about “Housing First”, an approach to helping homeless people that has convinced governments and non-profits alike to see housing as a human right, Sam Tsemberis experienced a first.

He was censored by the US government.

In the 1990s, Tsemberis began developing a simple idea: people living on the street want, and should have, safe housing with no strings attached. When you add accessible mental health and addiction services and caring, consistent case management, most stay housed. His research would bear out the idea, showing that Housing First results in at least 85% of people staying housed 12 or 24 months later, depending on the study. These are higher rates than any other approach that’s been studied.

The idea was and still is not easy to implement because it depends on all the components being present: the apartments, the services and the committed case workers. It also requires believing that unhoused people “deserve” a place to live – a belief abhorrent to the Trump administration and most Maga conservatives."

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2026/feb/12/sam-tsemberis-homelessness?CMP=share_btn_url 

The Guardian: "What to know about the jury trials of Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube"

"Social media companies will have to answer to a jury – for the first time – for allegations that their products are intentionally addictive and harmful to young users’ mental health. Hundreds of parents, teens and school districts sued Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube, leading to a series of landmark trials that began this week. Jury selection in the first case started on Tuesday in Los Angeles court.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is among the big tech CEOs who are expected to testify. Both sides are likely to bring in experts to hash out the science behind alleged addiction to social media.

Social media companies
will have to answer to a jury

The initial trial involves a 20-year-old, identified by the initials KGM, who alleges she experienced physical and emotional harm after becoming addicted to social media at age 10. This case is expected to last six to eight weeks, and will be the first of about 22 “bellwether” trials. The outcome can signal, and influence, how courts and juries may handle similar lawsuits in the future. Snap and TikTok have settled with the plaintiff in the first case, leaving Meta and YouTube to stand trial.

“Everybody’s looking at it as a data point,” said Benjamin Zipursky, a law professor at Fordham University."

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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/31/what-to-know-trials-meta-snap-tiktok-youtube?CMP=share_btn_url 

The Guardian: "The arrest of Don Lemon is blatant censorship. And he is not the only one"

The arrest of Don Lemon is blatant censorship. And he is not the only one | Seth Stern

The arrest of Don Lemon
is blatant censorship

"Two federal courts reviewed the government’s evidence against journalist Don Lemon and declined to approve his arrest last week. But nevertheless, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, persisted, desperate to please her authoritarian boss no matter what the constitution and law say or what her ethical obligations as an attorney require.

Thursday’s arrests of Lemon and Georgia Fort, an independent journalist – like the recent raid on Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter – demonstrate the administration’s lawless crusade against routine journalism. In normal times the expectation is that even when a journalist’s conduct might technically fit the legal elements of a crime – jaywalking to get footage of a protest, for example – prosecutors will exercise their discretion and judgment to not apply the law in a manner that chills the free press.

Those assumptions are inverted now. Even when journalists’ conduct is plainly non-criminal, prosecutors will work overtime to figure out some way to harass them, no matter how frivolous. Discouraging journalists from doing their job is not a side-effect they seek to avoid – it’s the whole point. There is no telling what nonsensical legal theories the administration may advance if it decides to make an example of a reporter it doesn’t like. The law and constitution are only marginally relevant – the only real rule is don’t piss off Trump."

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  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/30/don-lemon-arrest-first-amendment-journalism?CMP=share_btn_url

'The LED of heating': cheap geothermal energy system makes US comeback

Nearly half a century ago, the US Department of Energy launched a clean energy experiment beneath the University of Minnesota with a simple goal: storing hot water for months at a time in an aquifer more than 100 metres below ground.

The idea of the seasonal thermal energy storage was to tuck away excess heat produced in summer, then use it in the winter to warm buildings.

Now, 45 years after the first test wells were drilled under the university’s St Paul campus, one of the first large-scale aquifer thermal energy systems in the country is being built less than 10 miles from the original test site.

Geothermal makes a comeback

The Heights, a mixed-use development rising from a former golf course on the city’s Greater East Side, will tap thermal energy from an aquifer 100 to 150 metres below ground.

Groundwater from wells spread across the northern half of the 45-hectare development will be drawn by high-efficiency electric heat pumps, powered in part by solar panels, to provide low-cost heating and cooling with little greenhouse gas emissions for 850 homes and several light-industrial buildings.

Continue reading the article with this 'share link' ->   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/cheap-geothermal-energy-system-makes-us-comeback-minnesota?CMP=share_btn_url 

The Guardian: "First wheelchair-using astronaut touches down after ride to edge of space"

"A paraplegic engineer from Germany blasted off on a dream-come-true rocket ride with five other passengers on Saturday, leaving her wheelchair behind to float in space while beholding Earth from on high.

The Guardian: "First wheelchair-using astronaut
touches down after ride to edge of space"

Severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user in space, launching from west Texas with Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. She was accompanied by a retired SpaceX executive also born in Germany, Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organize and, along with Blue Origin, sponsored her trip. Their ticket prices were not divulged.

An ecstatic Benthaus said she laughed all the way up – the capsule soared more than 65 miles (105km) – and tried to turn upside down once in space.

“It was the coolest experience,” she said shortly after landing."

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/dec/20/first-wheelchair-using-astronaut-blur-origin-rocket?CMP=share_btn_url 

The Guardian: 'You don't have to do it alone': how US cities are helping each other resist ICE

"When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set its sights on Chicago in September, Chicagoans sprang into action to protect their immigrant neighbors: teaching each other how to recognize and safely document ICE agents, setting up “know your rights” trainings, and distributing whistles en masse so people could loudly alert anyone in the vicinity when ICE was spotted.

In the months since, whistles have become a popular raid alert tool in other cities across the country – New Yorkers wear them around their necks to warn neighbors, the people of New Orleans blast them outside ICE facilities and Charlotte residents used them to ward off Customs and Border Protection officials. While strongly associated with Chicago, the tactic is actually one that city organizers learned in part from groups in Los Angeles. Its spread is illustrative of the many ways cities are helping inspire and equip one another in the face of often unlawful federal activities.

Rain Skau, a co-coordinator of the Fight Fascism campaign of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles, said Angelenos began to use whistles to alert neighbors about ICE presence when agents first started hitting the city in June. Despite the federal government’s claims that these raids were targeting hardened criminals, Skau described one of the first raids at a Home Depot as mostly snatching women vending food in the parking lot, stuffing them into vans as meat sizzled on the grills they left behind."

Shared from "gift link" -> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/ice-immigration-raids-cities?CMP=share_btn_url 

The Guardian: "It's still not OK boomer: younger Americans are flailing – and mad as hell"

"Almost every couple that I know in their 20s, 30s or even 40s has had the same argument with their parents before getting married.

The Guardian: "It's still not OK boomer:
younger Americans are flailing – and mad as hell"

The parents say to open a wedding registry. The couple responds that they do not want one. They don’t expect gifts from wedding guests (their “presence is enough”), and they have been cohabiting for years and already have plates, bedsheets and a blender. In fact, since they live in a small rented apartment, they barely have room for the plates that they do have – let alone a set of china.

Perhaps, they will timidly suggest, guests who really want to give a gift can donate to a honeymoon fund? Or better yet, make a small contribution toward a downpayment on a house?

The parents get upset. Asking for cash, they say, is “tacky”, and also puts people in the difficult position of having to choose an amount to give. The young couple will point out that they are not asking for cash, just giving an option for those who want to mark the occasion."

Continue reading the article -> "It's still not OK boomer: younger Americans are flailing – and mad as hell" | J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/07/boomer-millennial-gen-z-housing?CMP=share_btn_url

The Guardian: "Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

"Brain has five 'eras', scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

"Scientists have identified five major “epochs” of human brain development in one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age.

The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been characterised by different phases. It turns out that brains also go through these eras,” said Prof Duncan Astle, a researcher in neuroinformatics at Cambridge University and senior author of the study."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/25/brain-human-cognitive-development-life-stages-cambridge-study?CMP=share_btn_url

Continue reading the full article in The Guardian ->   https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/25/brain-human-cognitive-development-life-stages-cambridge-study?CMP=share_btn_url 

Direct link to the study published by Nature as referenced

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65974-8

The Guardian: "US supreme court extends Trump pause on $4bn in food aid benefits"

"Millions of Americans grappling with food insecurity will face more uncertainty this week after the US supreme court enabled the Trump administration to continue withholding funds for food stamps.

In an administrative stay issued on Tuesday, the highest court upheld the administration’s request to extend a pause on a federal judge’s ruling that would have required $4bn in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Snap, the food aid relied on by 42 million people, to be distributed. The funding freeze has been given two additional days, and will now remain in place until midnight on Thursday.

With the House planning to vote Wednesday on a package that could spell the end to the longest government shutdown in US history, the administration has dug its heels in on fully funding the essential food program, insisting the funds will only be cleared when Congress comes to a compromise.

“The only way to end this crisis – which the executive is adamant to end – is for Congress to reopen the government,” solicitor general D John Sauer wrote in the Trump administration’s filing."

Continue reading the full article -> 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/11/us-supreme-court-trump-snap-food-benefits

You can help the Franklin Food Pantry meeting the increasing need during these times of uncertainty with a monetary donation or purchase from their Amazon Wish list...   

scroll down the home page to make a choice ->
https://www.franklinfoodpantry.org/

The Guardian: Changes at National Museum of American History come amid president’s push to reshape US cultural agencies

"The Smithsonian Institution has scrubbed all mention of Donald Trump’s impeachments from a prominent display at the National Museum of American History, temporarily eliminating any acknowledgment of the president’s unique status as the only US leader the House impeached twice.

The alterations to the presidential power exhibit, first reported by the Washington Post, occurred in July, with museum officials replacing contemporary signage with an older version that excludes Trump’s impeachment proceedings entirely. Visitors now see only a generic reference to three presidents facing potential removal from office.

An exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of
American History in Washington DC on 31 March.
Photograph: Maansi Srivastava for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Museum representatives confirmed the changes followed an institutional review of exhibition content.

“In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed,” a Smithsonian spokesperson told the Guardian. “Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.”

Shared from ->  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/smithsonian-trump-impeachments?CMP=share_btn_url

"“This is a very targeted, well-thought-out plan of dismantling the Snap program that federal policy makers won’t take responsibility for"

"Poverty and hunger will rise as a result of the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to the US federal “food stamps” program, according to experts. Low-income workers who rely on the aid are braced for dire consequences.

Katie Giede, a single mother and waitress in Conyers, Georgia, is one of the 42 million Americans who use the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap). Even with the maximum benefit permitted, she struggles to afford food for her and her child.

Low-wage workers reeling over Trump’s
looming Snap cuts as food prices rise

She makes $3 an hour plus tips at the fast-food chain Waffle House, where she has worked for 11 years. The company deducts meals from workers’ pay check per shift, regardless of whether they eat one or not.

“Our pay is already so little that we’re struggling with everything,” Giede told the Guardian. “Single mothers like myself are reliant upon the benefits like Snap and Medicaid. So when you go and you cut that as well, now you have mothers out here that are not only worried at night because they already can’t afford housing or a vehicle, but we’re also worried what is our kid is going to eat? Because we no longer have help.”

Continue reading the article -> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/snap-food-stamps-trump-cuts?CMP=share_btn_url

How do we lead moral lives in the age of bullies?

How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies? | Robert Reich

"We are living in an age of bullies. Those with power are less constrained today than they have been in my lifetime, since the end of the second world war.

How do we lead moral lives in the age of bullies?

The question is: how do we lead moral lives in this era?

Vladimir Putin launches a horrendous war on Ukraine. After Hamas’s atrocity, Benjamin Netanyahu bombs Gaza to smithereens and is now starving to death its remaining occupants.

Trump abducts thousands of hardworking people within the US and puts them into detention camps – splitting their families, spreading fear. His immigration agents are accused of targeting people with brown skin.

He usurps the powers of Congress, defies the courts, and prosecutes his enemies."

Continue reading the article ->   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/28/bullies-moral-lives-robert-reich?CMP=share_btn_url 

How Boston is handling climate in the face of riding tides via The Guardian

Via The Guardian, we can read: 

"As the Trump administration dismisses global heating, the coastal city is getting on with becoming one of the most climate resilient in the world. Here’s how

Patrick Devine, a captain for Boston Harbor City Cruises, shows me on his phone the scenes here in September 2024. The water was ankle-deep outside the door to his office on Long Wharf, one of the US city’s oldest piers, obscuring the pavements and walkways, surging into buildings and ruining vehicles in the car parks. “It just gets worse and worse each year,” says Devine, who has worked here, on and off, since 1995. “I’ve gotten used to it, so it’s just knowing your way around it.”

A waiter at Chart House restaurant in Boston

Much of Boston has got used to this. Devine has his own supply of sandbags now, for example. Next door to his office is the Chart House restaurant – when Long Wharf flooded last September, customers merrily sat at outside tables, holding their feet above the waterline, as servers with black bin bags for trousers waded over to bring them their lunches. The restaurant’s floor level is lower than that of the wharf, so the water came up to knee level in some areas. “It’s just part of business,” says one waiter, as he points out how the plug sockets are all at waist height. The place has flooded three times in the year he’s worked here. “We just clean it up, squeeze it out, open the doors, dry it out. It is what it is.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/24/flood-boston-climate-deniers-trump-administration-coastal-city-resilient?CMP=share_btn_url

The Guardian: "The stadium myth: new grounds won’t rescue your club – or your city"

new grounds won’t rescue your club – or your city

"Across Europe and the US, stadiums have become the great hope of urban regeneration – the prize asset that will, local officials hope, bring life and money back to stagnating cities. Superficially this seems like a perfect marriage: top clubs need the increased revenue that bigger, more sophisticated stadiums with richer facilities will bring, and cities need the boost to economic activity that should in theory follow from the construction of a major new venue. It’s true, of course, that in professional sport’s new world, revenue is king. For a football club in Europe to move, say, from a cramped and under-serviced 30,000-seater to a sleek new arena with room for 60,000 people and all the other assorted nonsense represents a massive step up in economic power, with the security to lock in chunky revenue streams for decades to come. In England, the economic incentives for stadium construction are even more powerful given that infrastructure expenses are exempt from the Premier League’s new profitability rules: for top clubs, building big has become something akin to a financial free kick."

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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/apr/29/football-soccer-stadiums-everton-nfl

I can’t go everywhere my daughter goes – and it’s heartbreaking | Well actually | The Guardian

"We met K when she was a week old. We were foster parents and not expecting a call about a newborn. Despite becoming her mom with just 12 hours’ notice – we adopted her the next year – my early months with her felt so natural.

I had been disabled for six years. While on a hike, I developed dysautonomia, which is secondary to a genetic connective tissue disorder called hEDS [hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome]. I experience a great deal of daily pain and can’t stand for more than a minute or sit upright unsupported for more than five.

As a result, I spend most of my day reclined. Her high need for physical contact in infancy fit my need to rest all day. She didn’t need a mom who could pace. She needed a mom who didn’t get bored lying on the sofa. We were a perfect match.

After a few months with K, we started to make plans. The first was a trip to a small island called Lummi off the coast of Washington state. We flew out of Oakland; a friend drove us to the airport and helped us check the bags. David pushed me in my wheelchair, and I carried K on my lap. Once in the air, we learned the hard way that air pressure changes can contribute to diaper blowouts, but the flight was, generally, fine."

For some disabled or chronically ill people, leaving the house isn’t possible at all. But for others, the barriers are structural. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading the article online -> https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/apr/15/parenting-disability-wheelchair 

The Guardian: "Trump administration cancels classes at National Fire Academy amid funding freeze"

"The country’s pre-eminent federal fire training academy canceled classes, effective immediately, on Saturday amid the ongoing flurry of funding freezes and staffing cuts by Donald Trump’s administration.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that National Fire Academy (NFA) courses had been canceled amid a “process of evaluating agency programs and spending to ensure alignment with Administration priorities”, according to a notice sent to instructors, students and fire departments. Instructors were told to cancel all future travel until further notice.

Firefighters, emergency medical service providers and other first responders from across the country travel to the NFA’s Maryland campus for the federally funded institution’s free training programs.

“The NFA is a powerhouse for the fire service,” said Marc Bashoor, a former Maryland fire chief and West Virginia emergency services director with 44 years of fire safety experience. “It’s not a ‘nice to have’. It is the one avenue we have to bring people from all over the country to learn from and with each other. If we want to continue to have one of the premier fire services in the world, we need to have the National Fire Academy.”

Shared from (subscription maybe required) -> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/08/trump-administration-national-fire-academy

The Guardian: Big oil spent $445m in last election cycle to influence Trump and Congress, report says

"Big oil spent a stunning $445m throughout the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and Congress, a new analysis has found.

That figure includes funding from January 2023 and November 2024 for political donations, lobbying and advertising to support elected officials and specific policies. Because it does not include money funneled through dark-money groups – which do not have to reveal their donors – it is almost certainly a vast understatement, says the report from green advocacy group Climate Power, which is based on campaign finance disclosures and advertising industry data.

Fossil fuel interests poured $96m into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and affiliated political action committees, the report found. Much of that was covered by megadonor oil billionaires, such as the fracking magnate Harold Hamm, the pipeline mogul Kelcy Warren and the drilling tycoon Jeffery Hildebrand.

Additional contributions came from lesser-known oil and gas interests, including fossil fuel-trading hedge funds, mining corporations and the producers of offshore-drilling ships and fuel tanks."

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/23/big-oil-445m-trump-congress?CMP=share_btn_url 

Meta ending third-party fact-checking partnership with US partners, including PolitiFact

"Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.

Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”."

Shared from -> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content

And from PolitiFact, a part of the Poynter Institute and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize

"By now you may have seen the news that Meta is ending its partnership with fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact in the United States so, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, Facebook can get “back to our roots around free expression.”

Instead of relying on a group of 10 independent and independently operated journalism organizations, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would be launching a community notes program like the one that currently exists on X.

We hope that program succeeds.

But it didn’t need to be an either or. It could have been both.

Back in 2016, when we were among the first group of journalism organizations to partner with Facebook to add fact-checks to online posts, we did so because we thought adding more speech, more voices and more information to what social media users saw online would help the information ecosystem.

Facebook’s approach at the time was novel. Information from a set of independent journalists would be paired with posts online, and users would be able to see a fuller picture of the stories and news of the day.

More speech.

More information."

Read more -> https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jan/07/meta-ending-third-party-fact-checking-partnership/

The Guardian: "‘People do not want to believe it is true’: the photographer capturing the vanishing of glaciers"

glaciers in Svalbard were melting

"Standing in blinding sunlight on an archipelago above the Arctic Circle, the photographer Christian Åslund looked in shock at a glacier he had last visited in 2002. It had almost completely disappeared.

Two decades ago Greenpeace asked Åslund to use photographs taken in the early 20th century, and photograph the same views in order to document how glaciers in Svalbard were melting due to global heating. The difference in ice density in those pictures, taken almost a century apart, was staggering.

This summer he visited those same places again, 22 years later, to find that the glaciers had visibly shrunk again.

“In 2002, climate change wasn’t as well known as it is now, so that was a compete shock when we saw it,” he says. “And then I didn’t know what to expect going back this time. But seeing all the glaciers, we really saw the difference from these last 22 years. There is a massive amount of glacier ice that has disappeared.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/05/people-do-not-want-to-believe-it-is-true-the-photographer-capturing-the-vanishing-of-glaciers