True Left

There's a lot to unpack in today's video and a lot of nuance we need to honor so stay with me y'all. We're chatting about how capitalism, especially late stage capitalism, leeches into everything and corrupts everything, what capitalism does to our mental health, the sexist and problematic history of the mental health field, and my perspective as a therapist about what our work is to address all of that. Let me know what your thoughts are in those comments because I know there's gonna be a lot of discussion about this one!

I'm disabled. I have a rare genetic condition that didn't show up (flare) until I was an adult. My now adult children also have the condition and are disabled. I've been told by relatives that I should just off myself because I'm a burden on my husband, my family, culture, and society. I really appreciate this video. I don't believe that my value is in my ability to be productive in the capitalistic machine, but so many people do. I refuse to tell my children that they have no value if they cannot work in a traditional sense. My (non-toxic) family and friends value me for who I am not what I can bring to the economy. Unfortunately the mindset that you are only allowed to be alive if you are highly productive results in a lot of ableism, bias, and even more barriers to help in our society.

I have desperately tried to explain to my psych that I can handle what's going on inside of me. I've learned to manage that. It's the oppressiveness of forces acting upon me that's the problem right now. I can't get anyone in my care team, especially social workers, to call me back so that I can get financial help for myself and my family.
Everyone in the medical profession needs to be an advocate for us.

I had a therapist a couple decades ago who I don’t believe helped me with what I went to her for but I always remember her saying “I don’t believe that everyone must work.” and “It’s ok if you don’t work. Not everyone has to work.” I thought I had wasted all that time with therapy but now I see that she helped me a lot just not with what I wanted at the time. She was decades ahead of her time about end stage capitalism. Thank you, lady in San Francisco. 🙏

So I quit my job yesterday because it was really starting to harm my mental health. They kept expecting more and more productivity and I felt I was at the point where you kinda trip and then fly off the treadmill so instead I jumped off. I don't have a solid plan for what's next but I'll figure it out.

Across five decades of psychological research, publications that highlight race are rare, and when race is discussed, it is authored mostly and edited almost entirely by white scholars, according to a new Stanford study.

Plastic rocks found on remote Brazilian island are 'terrifying,' scientists say

Melted plastic has become intertwined with rocks on the Brazilian island of Trindade, researchers said, calling the discovery "new and terrifying."

East Palestine train derailment: Toxic waste removal restarts in Ohio town

A total of 38 cars derailed in the 3 February incident, including 11 carrying hazardous materials.

Over the weekend, officials said that the air quality in the town is normal, despite ongoing fears from residents.

a town hall meeting in which East Palestine residents - as well as environmental activist Erin Brockovich - called on the government to provide more answers about why people continue to report feeling ill in the wake of the derailment.

"They're worried, because they've got coughs and respiratory problems," Ms Brockovich told the BBC's US partner, CBS. "There're so many unanswered questions, and they know this isn't the last of this conversation."

Sir John Bennet Lawes, 1st Baronet, FRS (28 December 1814 – 31 August 1900) was an English entrepreneur and agricultural scientist.[1] He founded an experimental farm at his home at Rothamsted Manor that eventually became Rothamsted Research, where he developed a superphosphate that would mark the beginnings of the chemical fertilizer industry.

Around seventy percent of the world's cobalt is mined in the Central African country, mostly from the southern Katanga area, thought to be one of the ten most polluted places on earth. Reporter Jamal Osman travels to Kolwezi, a city dependent on supplying Cobalt, a critical component for electric cars and rechargeable batteries.  Residents are employed by large multinational companies, or in smaller, and more dangerous artisanal mines. We meet the men who clamber down dark weaving airless tunnels to extract cobalt for as little as $150 per month. But is the paycheck worth the health risks that doctors have uncovered?

Swedish chemist Georg Brandt (1694–1768) is credited with discovering cobalt circa 1735, showing it to be a previously unknown element, distinct from bismuth and other traditional metals.

Radioactive capsule remains lost in Australia, mining company apologizes

A mining corporation on Sunday apologized for losing a highly radioactive capsule over a 1,400-kilometre stretch of Western Australia, as authorities combed parts of the road looking for the tiny but dangerous substance.

The caesium-137 ceramic source, commonly used in radiation gauges, emits dangerous amounts of radiation, equivalent to receiving 10 X-rays in an hour, Western Australia Chief Health Officer Dr. Andrew Robertson said. It could cause skin burns, and prolonged exposure could cause cancer.

A growing chorus of architects argue we have to build differently with concrete — which contributes to global warming and environmental destruction on a scale that’s hard to fathom — or perhaps abandon it altogether.

[...]“The modernist utopian dream that the speed and malleability of concrete might solve housing crises, revolutionize cities and birth new ways of living and being was already being shattered by a spiraling capitalist cycle of speculation, construction, deterioration and demolition.”

[...]Most of humanity now lives in cities made possible by concrete. The majority of buildings, from skyscrapers to social housing, are made of concrete or contain large amounts of it. Even buildings made from steel, stone, brick or timber are almost always resting on concrete foundations and are sometimes masking an unseen concrete frame. Inside, concrete is ceilings and floors. Outside, it is bridges and sidewalks, piers and parking lots, roads and tunnels and airport landing strips and subway systems. It is water pipes, sewers and storm drains. It is electricity: dams and power plants and the foundations of wind turbines. Concrete is the wall between Israel and Palestine and the Berlin Wall and most other walls. It is “almost anything,” wrote the architect Sarah Nichols in an essay this year, “almost anywhere.”

[...]Concrete is modern, yet ancient. There’s a sense in which it was born in the bowels of volcanoes, formulated by the eruptions of the Earth. Around 100 B.C., Romans discovered that volcanic ash from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius could be mixed with lime and wetted to create a cement, to which they added aggregate. Roman concrete was used to build structures like the Pantheon and the Colosseum, original parts of which still stand today. The story goes that their recipe was lost until it was rediscovered in the ancient books of Vitruvius. What seems more likely is that the use of concrete became much rarer, but never completely died, and still circulated via artisanal builders and craftsmen, until engineers and scientists across Europe eventually understood and then industrialized it.

[...]Concrete is now the second-most consumed substance on Earth behind only water. Thirty-three billion tons of it are used each year, making it by far the most abundant human-made material in history. To make all that, we now devour around 4 billion tons of cement each year — more than in the entire first half of the 20th century, and over a billion tons more than the food we eat annually.

Such a monstrous scale of production has monstrous consequences. Concrete has been like a nuclear bomb in man’s conquest of nature: redirecting great rivers (often away from the communities that had come to rely on them), reducing quarried mountains to mere hills, and contributing to biodiversity loss and mass flooding by effectively sealing large swathes of land in an impermeable grey crust. The other key ingredients all bring their own separate crises, from the destructive sand mining of riverbeds and beaches to the use of almost 2% of the world’s water.

But most significantly, the carbon-intensive nature of cement has been catastrophic for the atmosphere. The kilns used to heat limestone are commonly run on fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gases, and as it heats up, the limestone itself releases more CO2. Every kilogram of cement created produces more than half a kilogram of CO2. The greenhouse gas emissions of the global aviation industry (2-3%) are dwarfed by those of the cement industry (around 8%). If concrete was a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter, behind only the U.S. and China. In Chile, the region that houses most of the cement plants, Quintero, has become so polluted that it was nicknamed “the sacrifice zone.”