by VIOLETA RUIZ

The convergence of singular talent and profound disability confounded scientists eager to place humans into neat categories

On 25 November 1915, the American newspaper The Review published the extraordinary case of an 11-year-old boy with prodigious mathematical abilities. Perched on a hill close to a set of railroad tracks, he could memorise all the numbers of the train carriages that sped by at 30 mph, add them up, and provide the correct total sum. What was remarkable about the case was not just his ability to calculate large numbers (and read them on a moving vehicle), but the fact that he could barely eat unassisted or recognise the faces of people he met. The juxtaposition between his supposed arrested development and his numerical facility made his mathematical feats even more impressive. ‘How can you account for it?’ asked the article’s author. The answer took the form of a medical label: the boy was what 19th-century medicine termed an ‘idiot savant’. He possessed an exceptional talent, despite a profound impairment of the mental faculties that affected both his motor and social skills.

A century after The Review relayed the prodigious child’s mathematical abilities, trying to understand ‘how they do it’ still drives psychological research into savantism or ‘savant syndrome’ to this day. The SSM Health Treffert Centre in Wisconsin – named after Darold Treffert (1933-2020), one of the leading experts in the field – defines the savant phenomenon as ‘a rare condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have an amazing ability and talent’. Today, savantism is largely comprehended through the lens of neurodivergence, since the association between savantism and autism is strong: roughly one in 10 people with autism exhibit some savant skills, while savantism in the absence of autism is much rarer.

Psychological studies by Simon Baron-Cohen and Michael Lombardo, for example, have focused on the neurological basis of ‘systemising’, where exceptional mathematical or musical skills exist among people diagnosed with autism: such people are ‘hypersystemisers’, that is, they are especially good at identifying ‘laws, rules, and/or regularities’. It is believed that their brain’s systemising mechanisms are ‘tuned to very high levels’, making them acutely sensitive to sensory input and also capable of intense attentional focus and rule-learning.

But in the past (autism became a diagnostic category only in 1943), the ‘idiot savant’ was a paradox, who confounded categorisation because there was no unified way of comprehending how such exceptional musical and numerical skills might co-exist alongside their polar opposite: profound disability. To use the language of the 19th century, how could a person be at once both a ‘genius’ and an ‘idiot’? The savant challenged conventional understandings of how talent was manifested, and who could manifest it, and at the same time upset notions of who might be classed as an ‘idiot’. In the scheme of how intelligence was understood then, the savant was at best otherworldly and at worst a monstrosity.

The historian Patrick McDonagh points out that ‘idiocy’ was a highly ambiguous medical term that was nonetheless widely accepted. Perhaps, in part, because it was a boundaried category that fulfilled an important social-symbolic function: namely, it offered a contrast against which modern individuals could define themselves as rational and intelligent, reinforcing their claims to respect and social authority. It also meant that people like that 11-year-old boy who was fascinated with numbers but was nonetheless considered an ‘idiot’ – in the medical parlance of the day – created a contradiction that continues to have implications today.

Aeon for more

CIVICUS

Oct 24 2025 (IPS) – CIVICUS speaks about the disappearance of Turkmen activists Abdulla Orusov and Alisher Sahatov with human rights defender Diana Dadasheva from the civil movement DAYANÇ/Turkmenistan and with Gülala Hasanova, wife of Alisher Sahatov.

On 24 July, Turkmen activists Abdulla Orusov and Alisher Sahatov were abducted in Edirne, Turkey, after being labelled a ‘threat to public order.’ Despite applying for international protection, they were unlawfully deported to Turkmenistan. Orusov and Sahatov, prominent voices in the diaspora through their YouTube channel Erkin Garaýy?, are now being detained, starved and denied a fair trial, while authorities are deliberately delaying proceedings to exclude them from an upcoming amnesty. Their cases highlight the growing risks faced abroad by Turkmen activists, who are being targeted beyond their country’s borders. The international community must push to secure their immediate release and end such abuses.

What happened to Abdulla Orusov and Alisher Sahatov?

Abdulla Orusov and Alisher Sahatov are Turkmen civil activists and bloggers who reported on human rights violations, corruption, migrant issues and social hardships faced by people in Turkmenistan. They were among the few who dared to speak when most were forced into silence.

Last April, Turkish police came to their home under the pretext of checking their documents. Acting on Turkmenistan’s request, they detained both men on false terrorism charges, claiming they posed a threat to Turkey’s national security. They were taken to a deportation centre in Sinop and later transferred to Edirne.

The Turkish Supreme Court ruled that returning them to Turkmenistan would put their lives in danger and ordered an end to the deportation process. But on 24 July, immediately after their release, they disappeared. Reliable sources told us they had been secretly flown to Turkmenistan on a cargo plane, under the supervision of Officer Amangeldiyev Amangeldy, who was later awarded a medal for the operation.

To this day, we don’t know where they are or in what condition. Their abduction is a serious crime and a blatant violation of international law.

Are there other examples of such human rights violations?

Over recent years, many Turkmen activists who were brave enough to speak up have disappeared in Turkey and Russia, including Malikberdy Allamyradov, Azat Isakov, Rovshen Klychev, Farhad Meymankuliev and Merdan Mukhammedov. Activist Umida Bekjanova is currently detained in a Turkish deportation centre and we fear she may face the same fate.

Turkmen authorities are carrying out a systematic campaign to eliminate independent civic voices. In today’s Turkmenistan, anyone who refuses to stay silent risks being branded a terrorist or enemy of the state. These labels have become tools of repression, used to justify abductions, fabricate criminal charges and force people to return to Turkmenistan.

What risks do Abdulla, Alisher and other activists face after being forcibly returned?

Their lives are in danger. We receive reports of torture, starvation, humiliation and psychological abuse. They are held in isolation, denied legal defence and a fair trial.

In Turkmenistan, there are no independent courts, lawyers or free media. People disappear into secret prisons for years, cut off from their families and the world. We don’t know where they are or if they are still alive. For their relatives and loved ones, this means endless waiting and despair, a slow, silent form of torture.

How has this affected your families?

Having my husband abducted has destroyed our lives. I am raising four children who ask every day when their father will return. We live in pain and fear, under constant surveillance and threats.

Being a Turkmen activist means facing harsh living conditions. Some, like Diana, live without documents or means of subsistence or social protection, caring for small children under the constant fear of being abducted.

Still, we refuse to stay silent; if we did, others would disappear too. Together with the DAYANÇ/Turkmenistan Human Rights Platform, we have declared a hunger strike until Abdullah and Alisher return home safely. We have also launched a campaign ‘If I Disappear – Don’t Stay Silent’ where we publicly name those who will be responsible if we too disappear. This is how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, because today it’s Abdulla and Alisher but tomorrow it could be any of us.

What do you expect from the international community?

The international community must act urgently to secure the release of Abdulla, Alisher and other disappeared activists. They must also demand Turkmenistan put an end to the criminal practice of labelling people as terrorists for simply speaking the truth.

IPS News for more

by HAN FEIZI

If he dies without the prize in economics, the committee should just disband, having proven itself utterly irrelevant and inconsequential

Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore
That long black cloud is comin’ down
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s doorbob Dylan, Nobel Laureate

British economist John Ross impishly told one interviewer that if the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences were honest, the Nobel Prize in Economics would have been awarded to Chinese economists every year for the past four decades.

Objectively, he has a point. China’s real GDP is 50 times what it was since reform and opening up began in 1978, far outpacing growth rates in Japan and the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) during their miracle decades.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, a neat little math tool whose most primary use case is to match US and Canadian medical students with residency programs.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which, while clever, wasn’t necessary for options markets. Laureates Myron Scholes and Robert Merton did manage to blow up mega hedge fund LTCM in 1998, just a year after winning their Nobel Prize, when interest rates failed to follow their model.

A 50x increase in GDP since 1978 for 1.4 billion people has certainly been more impactful than, say, a self-congratulatory political theory on Western institutions, a theory surely belied by China’s spectacular growth and the West’s long malaise.

John Ross is now not alone. Economist Adam Tooze of Columbia University has suggested that the Nobel Prize in Economics be given to Chinese policy makers because China’s growth has been the most profound economic story of our lifetime.

Some would argue that the Nobel Prize in economics is for academic researchers, not practitioners. A fair point, perhaps, if such a rule existed. But in fact, we are unaware of such a rule and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Academy have a long history of arbitrarily changing the scope and definition of Nobel Prizes. Artificial intelligence for physics? What? Bob Dylan for literature? Huh?

The Nobel Prize in Economics has always been the bastard child of the Nobel litter. Not among the original five prizes established by Alfred Nobel (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace) upon his death in 1896, the economics prize was tacked on in 1969 by Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, as a “Prize in Economic Science dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel.”

Over the years, the Nobel Prize in economics has gone through 11 name changes from simplifying down to “Prize in Economic Science” to “Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel” to “Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences” to today’s unwieldy “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” 

Asia Times for more

by ASATO IKEDA

[Ed. Note: This article is part of an ongoing series and online exclusive exploring contemporary artists through interviews, commentary, and visual engagements provided by art historian Asato Ikeda. For other interviews in this series, see “Art and Politics with Asato Ikeda.“]

Abstract: In this conversation with Asato Ikeda, Atsushi Funahashi discusses his 2022 film Company Retreat, which is fiction based on a true story.¹ The film tells the story of a female employee Saki who works at a hotel and was sexually harassed by her boss. The story unfolds in Kamakura, where she and her co-workers have an emotional company retreat where their differing opinions about the sexual harassment incident collide. The film centers on the secondary trauma and harassment that survivors often encounter in Japan and elsewhere.

Atsushi Funahashi (b. 1974) is a Japanese film director. Originally from Osaka, he graduated from the University of Tokyo with a B.A. in cinema studies and studied film directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His representative works include Big River (2005), Nuclear Nation (2012), and Company Retreat (2022), and his films have been screened at major international film festivals, including Berlin, Annonay in France, Pusan, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, and Tokyo.

Ikeda: Thank you for making the time for this today. I re-watched Company Retreat for this interview a few days ago, and I’m still struck by how uncomfortable the film made me. As somebody who grew up in Japan, I remember how human relationships there can be convoluted in a particular way. There are certain very abstract phrases that are often used in Japan, such as “you are relying too much on other people” (amaeteiru), “you must work hard” (ganbatte), “we are a team” (nakama dakara),” or “don’t run away” (nigenaide). I am working on collaborative research on NHK data regarding sexual violence and consent with other researchers, but the survivors’ voices there are isolated from the cultural context.²I thought your film did a great job presenting that context—the dark aspects of Japanese culture—though I am having a hard time articulating exactly what they are. Perhaps narrow-mindedness and herd/village mentality?  I know you talked about the goal of your filmmaking as capturing the “unconsciousness of the times” (jidai no muishiki), which might be relevant here. Would you like to elaborate on this?

APJJF for more

by MOHAMAD HASAN SWEIDAN

As its military bombs Gaza, despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Tel Aviv launches a parallel online offensive aimed at silencing resistance narratives, manipulating global perceptions, and re-engineering the digital memory of its war crimes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the “Eighth Front” of his war as the battle over truth. “Seven fronts against Iran and its proxies. The eighth: the battle for the truth,” he said during a ceremony hosted by US network Newsmax at Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. 

Its aim is to refute accusations of genocide and deliberate famine linked to Israel’s two-year-long war on the strip, with social media and artificial intelligence (AI) programs serving as the most important battlegrounds on this front.

Digital Iron Dome

In the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, Israel’s so-called “Digital Iron Dome” was activated to intercept digital content just as its military dome intercepts missiles. But instead of shrapnel, the targets are ideas – posts, images, videos – that expose Israel’s atrocities in the besieged enclave.

This digital dome operates on two main layers. First is the volunteer-driven reporting system: a nationwide campaign in which users flood social media platforms with mass complaints against content deemed unfavorable to Israel. A hybrid of AI and human reviewers rapidly classifies flagged posts, then pushes takedown requests to platforms like Meta, TikTok, and X. The goal is speed – to kill the narrative before it spreads.

TikTok alone deleted 3.1 million videos and cut off 140,000 live streams in the first six months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Israeli Attorney General’s Cyber Unit filed nearly 9,500 takedown requests during the same period, with Meta allegedly complying 94 percent of the time.

The second layer is algorithmic warfare: AI systems scan over 200,000 websites to identify dissenting narratives, then bombard exposed users with paid pro-Israel content in real time. Using ad campaigns that mimic the look and timing of organic posts, Israel floods timelines with a manufactured counter-narrative.

This dual strategy aims to overwhelm and erase. The first suppresses the spread of resistance voices. The second replaces them with state-approved fabrications.

Weaponizing social media for war

“We’re all the targets of these wars. We’re the ones whose clicks decide whose side wins out.” 

– Peter Singer, co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

On 26 September 2025, Netanyahu met with 18 US-based social media influencers. The directive was to flood TikTok, X, YouTube, and podcasts with pro-Israel messaging. A week later, Tel Aviv allocated $145 million to its largest-ever digital propaganda campaign, dubbed “Project 545.” The campaign targets US public opinion, especially Gen Z, with AI-assisted content tailored for TikTok and Instagram.

The Cradle for more

by WALDEN BELLO

An interview with Jean Luc Melenchon and the leadership of La France Insoumise on the future of the French left.

Walden Bello Interviews Jean-Luc Melenchon and the leadership of La France Insoumise on the the deepening political crisis in France and its implications for the left and the alternative to the ancien regime.

In the nine years since its founding in 2016, La France Insoumise (LFI) has become the leading left formation in France, with its current parliamentary representation at 71, ahead of the traditional parties of the left, the Socialist Party and Communist Party. The personality most identified with it is Jean Luc Melenchon, who has run for president three times, the last time in 2022, when he gathered 21.9 percent of the votes, finishing third after second-placer Marine Le Pen of National Rally and Emmanuel Macron.  La France Insoumise describes its orientation as democratic socialist and ecosocialist.

The following is a composite interview. When he visited Paris in July 2025, Walden Bello interviewed some of the leaders of LFI, including Nadege Abomangoli, vice president of the National Assembly; Aurelie Trouve, chairwoman of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Assembly; and members of parliament Arnaud Le Gall, Aurelien Tache, and Aurelien Saintoul. This was followed in September 2025 by an email interview with LFI leader Jean Luc Melenchon (JLM).

The Crisis of Macronism

Walden Bello: Can you give your assessment of the current political situation in France?

La France Insoumise: In terms of the strategic situation, we are at the end of Macronism. The Macronists     are very divided and in their desperation, they’re allying with the far right.

Let’s begin by pointing out that last year, when the National Rally won the European Parliament elections, Macron was willing to make a deal with them. He was going to appoint a prime minister from the National Rally. That was the plan.

That did not happen. But even if it did not, the reality is that, Macronism has already absorbed much of the ideology and slogans of the far right. The Macronists are in an alliance with the far right in the current government. The Republicans, the traditional right-wing party, is already, more than ever, positioned alongside the far right. The new head of this party, a man named Bruno Retailleau, is now minister of the interior, and therefore of the police. In a meeting, he said, “Down with the veil.” As you know, this a slogan of the far right. Also, as you probably know, during the colonial war in Algeria, the French colonial community, also shouted, “Down with the veil,” targeting Muslim women. So this is something very old but at the same time very worrisome given the current situation. Islamophobia represents a very real threat insofar as it provides the ideological glue of all the right-wing forces in our country.

Popular Protests and the Left

WB: What are the key challenges facing the left at this point?

Jean Luc Melenchon : The capitalists are getting behind the far right. Do you know why? Because there is intense social mobilization against the decisions stemming from the neoliberal program. There is a pre-revolutionary atmosphere in France, by the admission of analysts who are themselves favorable to those in power.In fact, all over the world, for many years now, there have been revolutionary situations. We call these events “citizen revolutions.” In my book Now the People, I try to analyze them, including the conditions that produce them. This situation is what has worried Macron and the establishment.

In France, there was a movement of the yellow jackets. In the beginning, the traditional left did not support them. They said the yellow jackets were fascists. It was only 10 days after it began that the left, the trade unions, and the alter-globalization movement made a declaration saying we support them. What was happening was that a new line of conflict was emerging: not left versus right, but the oligarchy versus the people.

As you know there were mass protests that took place in 2005 and 2023. The character of the two protests were different. Those in 2005 took place in the suburbs of big cities.  Those in 2023 were in smaller cities as well. They were very young people. Some sociologists said the 2005 and 2023 protests had the same causes, but we think the 2023 protests were different. The people participating in them were very young, and they felt very deeply what they were against, including the right of the police to kill them, the license to kill, especially young Arab men.

There was no spokesperson, but it was clear what it was against. It was a reaction to an extra-judicial execution. And the polarization was sharper in 2023, partly because of social media. There was this outpouring of anger from the right in reaction to the protests, with some people expressing that it was right for the police to kill these young Arab and Black men.

Capitalism and Racism

WB: Were the protests in 2023 linked as well to economic issues?

LFI: Yes, they were, and we pointed out that the events were caused by neoliberal policies.

Foreign Policy In Focus for more

by TARIQ ALI

The gallery of grotesques assembled by Trump – only the toga was missing in his rendering of the Roman Emperor Nero – at Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort synonymous with luxury and despotism, dutifully celebrated ‘Peace in the Middle East’. What ‘peace’? Earlier that day in Jerusalem, Nero had declared ‘victory’ while addressing his cheering barbarian auxiliaries and donors in the Knesset:

We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of ‘em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ‘em! [Laughter] But we’d get ‘em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they are the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well.

‘What a job! What a job you’ve done’, Nero marvelled. ‘These are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.’ And before the final trumpet sounded, there was a shout out to Miriam Adelson, seated in the visitors’ gallery: ‘Isn’t that right, Miriam?’ Nero reminisced:

Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office . . . I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else . . . Look at her, sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank. $60 billion. [Laughter] I think she said, ‘No, more!’ And she loves Israel. . . Her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him . . . very supportive of me. And he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I’d say, ‘Sheldon, I’m the President of the United States, it doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in . . . they were very responsible for so much, including getting me thinking about the Golan Heights.

This train of thought – and the strings attached to the Adelsons’ donations – led him to wonder whether her primary loyalty was to America or Israel. ‘I’m going to get her into trouble with this, but I actually asked her once, “So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?”. She refused to answer. That means, it might be Israel!’

The question is, of course, supposed to be antisemitic according to the IHRA definition; at home, American campuses are being threatened or punished by Nero’s administration for less. Once again, he says the quiet part loud: laying bare the sordid role played by Israel Lobby cash in the shameless support by the US political and cultural establishment for the destruction of Gaza.

NLR for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“I saw spirits,” he told me. I had no reason at the time to doubt him. I was barely 10. Ravi* said he had worked in a submarine—a vessel I had heard of, abstractly—but he described its inner life, how pressure plates hummed, corridors tunnelled, and people lived and died inside the iron cocoon. He had eyes so arresting, skin soft as dusk, and he smiled like a child but spoke like a friend. One Sunday morning, on my way to church, he caught me near the banyan tree that marked the entry into my village.

He said: there is a space inside the submarine where we stand, staring into infinity. You see a wall, then a glass shield, and beyond it a place we call “vacuum”. That is where the spirits arrive. He described them: giant translucent tadpoles, illumination coiling through their wavy forms. Their eyes—ah, their eyes—were like mini-screens. Look closely and you would see life: events, places, voices, the whole arc of a life projected into that silverine retina. The owner of the spirit, dead now in flesh, lived again in those eyes.

He went on: I peered through the glass and I saw lives: quarrels, wars, deaths, rituals of gore, processions, suffering, torture, offices, witnesses, even regrets. But never laughter, never love. I did not know why; I just knew I never saw them. Because of the partition between us, I could not ask questions. But I am sure they saw me. Once, the spirit—its bulbous eyes with dancing blue and red dots—drifted close. It stared. I blinked. It blinked back. We did that Morse code of eyes for minutes.

“Do you know what Morse code is?” Ravi asked. “No,” I replied. “Ah, you will learn,” he said, and continued his story: I still believe it was a spirit that knew me—perhaps a friend, a tortured colleague, someone I once loved—because I somehow know its language. The spirit lingered, then drifted away. I told my friends. They heard me out, later I was sent home, Ravi summed up.

Over time, our meetings near the banyan tree multiplied. Ravi would arrive in a slim white dhoti, striped shirt, and kerchief tucked inside his collar. He told me stories: of flying waters, of a sea bottom carpeted in glowing roses, of lotuses that spoke and dwarfed whales, of currents that carried voices, and more.

Then one day, someone saw us talking and scolded him for “talking to children”. Others murmured, ”Why did his brother let this lunatic roam free?” They pushed him away. I remember how his face fell. I smiled back and longed to whisper, “I believe you”.

After that, I rarely saw him. When I did, we exchanged smiles. But to speak openly, to engage with him, was unthinkable. Those days, talking to a “schizophrenic”, a label I learnt later, invited ridicule, shudders, and scoldings. Soon I heard that he was ill-treated, then sheltered by some relatives, and eventually put on medication.

When I encountered him years later, he was a shell. No spirit stories, no childlike mirth. Thin, shivering, exhausted. Eyes empty. The stories had left him. His face had shrunk. I didn’t see him after that. But I remembered his stories.

Frontline for more

by IAN ANGUS

Some 2.8 million years ago, the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere dropped, triggering an Ice Age. Since then, long-term changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt, called Milankovitch cycles, have produced global temperature swings every 100,000 years or so. In the glacial (cold) phases, kilometers-thick ice sheets covered most of the planet; in shorter interglacial (warm) periods, the ice retreated toward the poles. For the past 11,700 years, we have lived in an interglacial period that geologists call the Holocene Epoch.

Under normal circumstances, the glaciers and polar ice caps would now be slowly growing. As recent research shows, “if not for the effects of increasing CO2, glacial inception would reach a maximum rate within the next 11,000 years.”1 Instead of global heating, the Earth’s future would be global freezing, but only in the distant future.

However, as anyone even slightly aware of environmental issues knows, the world’s glaciers and ice caps are not expanding; they are shrinking — fast. Between 1994 and 2017, Earth lost 28 trillion tons of ice, and the rate of decline has increased by 57 percent since the 1990s.2 Even if greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced, conditions preventing the return of continental ice sheets will likely persist for at least 50,000 years. If emissions do not stop, the ice will not be back for at least half a million years.3

In short, as a direct result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, the Ice Age has been canceled.

This is concrete proof of one of the most radical conclusions of twenty-first century science: “The earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita.”4

The scientists who first reached that conclusion named the new epoch the Anthropocene. An overwhelming volume of evidence shows that a new stage in Earth system history has begun, one characterized by major changes to many aspects of the natural world, heading toward conditions that humans may not survive. They have shown that many of the largest changes are irreversible on any human timescale. They have dated the beginning of this radical transformation to the mid-twentieth century. They have also shown that physical records of the change can be seen in geological strata.

To any reasonable observer, the case is irrefutable. Yet, some prominent scientists deny that a qualitative change has taken place, and one of the world’s largest scientific organizations has voted against formal recognition of the new epoch. The research and debates that led to this perverse result help to illuminate the challenges facing scientists and ecosocialists in our time.

Earth System Science

During the 1970s and ’80s, increasing numbers of scientists came to the conclusion that traditional scientific methods focusing on local or regional issues were insufficient for understanding environmental problems — that Earth as a whole had entered a period of extreme crisis caused by human activity.

Links for more

by ANITA NAIDU

The most insidious privatization of the 21st century isn’t material—it’s moral.

The right to define “goodness”, once born of collective struggle, has been seized by elites who trade in humanitarian spectacle.

Melinda Gates, María Corina Machado and Meghan Markle operate on different stages—philanthropy, politics, celebrity—but share the same function: to brand conscience.

Each turns compassion into capital and empathy into a marketing language that protects power rather than threatens it.

Gates and the Philanthropy of Containment 

Melinda Gates is the soft face of imperial power — a philanthropist who launders extraction through care.

Her coronation as a moral voice at the Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture exposed how philanthropy now performs containment rather than change.

The stage itself was symbolic: built to honor a man who made confrontation a moral duty, now offered to a woman who turned that duty into decor.

She stood inside a legacy built on risking everything to confront apartheid and used it to promote a brand of feminism that risks nothing.

Gaza burned; she said nothing. Her silence was not hesitation — it was calculation.

She replaced Tutu’s politics of confrontation with a politics of comfort as her feminism is engineered for elite compatibility: all uplift, no opposition.

What she brings is narrative management not generosity. Philanthropy has become the language through which empire edits its image.

Because empire’s favorite laundry detergent is feminism. The cleaner is uses to wash blood into virtue.

Investigative journalist Tim Schwab later traced what followed: two months after Gates’s lecture, theDesmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundationreceived a$30 000grantfrom theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In his October 2025 report, Schwab placed this within a wider pattern — philanthropic institutions accepting money from the same billionaires they then elevate with humanitarian honors.The optics, he noted, suggested a closed circuit where wealth purchases moral credibility.

The pattern held elsewhere. Weeks later, Gates accepted a human-rights award from the Clooney Foundation for Justice— an organization that, as

Schwab reported, has received millions in donations overseen by her through both the Gates Foundation and Pivotal Ventures.

His investigation placed this within a broader pattern: elites funding the very institutions that later celebrate them, a feedback loop of moral self-accreditation.

Her wealth buys access to movements built on sacrifice and then drains them of meaning.

She steps into spaces forged by resistance and repurposes them as backdrops for benevolence.

It is not confrontation she offers, but comfort —  empire’s preferred aesthetic.

Machado and the Capture of Peace

María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize was never about peace—it was about rewarding obedience to U.S. interests.

It was not recognition; it was choreography—the ritual of allegiance disguised as moral virtue.When she dedicated her award to Donald Trump, the transformation was complete. A symbol once meant to honor resistance became an instrument of domination. Trump—whose foreign policy left a trail of sanctions, bombings, and proxy wars—was recast as peacemaker.

Counterpunch for more