I often take a pair of pruners on my walks around town in case there is a stray branch impeding the way, but I may need to start lugging around a machete (yes, I have one). Jokes aside, I wish homeowners would show a bit of respect to the low-vision residents in the neighborhood who have to navigate these obstacles. #swarthmore #walking #sidewalks #plants #walkability #pruning #hedges #yardwork #streets #traffic #pedestrian

3 Bloomberg: The use of the #dollar as a go-between accounts for about 13% of its daily #trading volumes, according to a recent estimate #forex #hedges

2 Bloomberg: … are spurring demand for #non-dollar #hedges, several people said. The gradual shift away from the #dollar erodes one of the building blocks of #global #trade. For decades, it has been ubiquitous in everything from #emergingmarket #debt financing to #trade settlement. 🧵 #forex #USD

“The loss of the liberal class creates a power vacuum filled by speculators, war profiteers, gangsters, and killers, often led by charismatic #demagogues. It opens the door to totalitarian movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class and the values it claims to champion. The promises of these #totalitarian movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.”

Chris #Hedges, “Death of the Liberal Class” 2010.

Beaucoup de pro-palestiniens optimistes pensent qu'Israël est en difficulté; ils sont de plus en plus impopulaires mais cela n'a aucun effet sur les gouvernements qui sont de plus en plus soumis. J'ai bien peur que Chris #Hedges aie raison. Ils vont réussir à vider #Gaza et personne ne bougera.
https://www.defenddemocracy.press/israel-is-about-to-empty-gaza/

Like the Ritz for wildlife: the joy of recreating England’s ancient #hedges - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/17/england-ancient-hedges-wildlife "Up and down the country, volunteers are coming together to plant more of these nature-rich reserves" great to see #rewilding

Map obtained by aggregating the linear hedges recorded by the national bocage surveillance system into hexagonal grids of 2165 hectares to characterize hedges in France #hedges

https://hal.inrae.fr/RURALITES/hal-03209589v1

How #Fascism Came - Read by Eunice Wong
America’s #democracy was destroyed by the two ruling parties who sold us out to corporations, militarists and #billionaires
Now we pay the price.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-fascism-came-read-by-eunice-wong

Chris #Hedges

What to do if bullying? Try consistent boundaries

1. do not writhe or waver. (Movement attracts the bully)
2. do not attempt to appease. (Any offer is interpreted as weakness and obtains thrust)
3. flee to a safe position that you could hold with support
4. then stand still. Set limits on how others treat you. Affirm boundaries (The bully will redirect attacks eventually)
5. connect: turn to a trusted person, reach out only to someone you feel well about
6. offer backing, foster, become accomplice, enjoy

#boundaries #community #safety #negotiations #negotiating #allies #support #retreat #relationships #consistency #fragility #tips #lifeHacks #attitude #standing #resources #domination #violence #personalSafety #groupSafety #psychology #sociology #solutions #bullying #bullies #appeasement #containment #geoPolitics #politics #USPol #USPolitics #Europe #defense #defence #harassment #Ukraine #war #silentSunday #manliness #masculinity #patriarchy #enjoy #joy #solidarity #dappledLight #childhood #selfWorth #self #selfCare #trauma #abuse #family #mentalHealth #selfStudy #personal #intimate #positive #recall #care #domesticViolence #ThePromise #KeepThePromise #dispair #resentment #recoil #acceptation #anarchism #geoPolitics #Russia #Zelensky #NATO #stroll #hiking #hedges #hedge

Had the tall #hedges cut yesterday. All looks very neat. The garden assumes an almost #formal appearance. Quite amusing!
We may think of hedges, such as this, as a bit uninspiring but they are heavens for the wildlife. They offer space for #shelter and #nesting. It is important to cut them before the birds start to build nests.
‣ Upright. Click to see all.

#artistsgarden #ImperfectGarden #garden #GardenPhotography #Artist #wolfkettler #Photography #GardenWiltshire #WiltshireGarden #Wiltshire #winter #natural #NaturalGarden #formalGarden #WildlifeFriendly #conservation

Allotments looking pretty good post-storm, in the winter sun. No damage to poly tunnel or anything else - the hedges not fences golden rule triumphs again! #allotment #allotmentgarden #gardening #hedges

Path #snow #hedges #path #wickhambishops #essex #winter #cold #photo #photography https://flic.kr/p/2qDut9B

How to resist radical evil / Chris Hedges

https://youtu.be/2aFgG35gDhk?si=P85aW7EcLOYt36vs

#evil #hedges #resistance

after reading this text by Chris Hedges, I find that we see these things quite similarly - I think it's always good to be wary of whether we as a society are becoming like the "external enemy", that we are declaratively fighting against

By Chris #Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.

“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.” “The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.

Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.

“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”

The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality since the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in “Nickel and Dimed,” are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.

Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.

“The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour”:

It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is ‘correct.’ Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the ‘correct’ ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Chrtistian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television new personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.

“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in “Empire of Illusion”:

This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

My book “Empire of Illusion” begins in Madison Square Garden at a World Wrestling Entertainment tour. I understood that professional wrestling was the template for our social and political life, but did not know that it would produce a president.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” I wrote, in what could have been a description of a Trump rally:

They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives. The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime.

It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” — the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.

“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of “Empire of Illusion,” “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”

https://scheerpost.com/2024/12/23/chris-hedges-how-fascism-came/

#Chomsky
#Johnson
#Ehrenreich
#Nader
#fascist
#democratic
#liberal
#america
#economy
#concerns
#mainstream
#society
#Trump
#fascism
#corruption
#democracy
#totalitarianism
#Deindustrialization
#corporations
#industry
#democrats
#republicans
#capitalism
#russia
#wolin
#fascism
#liberalism
#anarchy
#anarchism

Lost Nature – housing developers fail to deliver their ecological commitments.

A survey of new #HousingDevelopments reveals that developers are installing just half of the ecological features that they should be.

A Wild Justice report, written by researchers at the University of Sheffield, has revealed that #HousingDevelopers are not keeping legally-binding promises to help wildlife on housing developments.

A survey of nearly 6,000 #house across 42 developments found that only half of the promises to mitigate harm to #nature had been kept. Many ecological enhancements had simply not materialised, with 83% of Hedgehog highways, 100% of bug boxes, and 75% of both bat and bird boxes found to be missing from new developments.

The delivery of plant life across sites also painted a depressing picture: 39% of the #trees detailed on planting plans were missing or dead, and nearly half of the native #hedges that were supposed to be laid did not exist.

See below for full and summary reports:

https://wildjustice.org.uk/general/lost-nature-report/

#BioDiversity #BioDiversityLoss #building #builders #ecology #EcologicalEmergency

Because of the recently passed #Storm #Bert, a lot of #trees and #hedges have shed #branches and #twigs, which can be more than just a mere nuisance. In the past, they have caused #punctures and have even jammed in the #spokes causing #skidding #hazards. Luckily, no problems today.

#Bike #Biking #Cycle #Cycling #Bicycle

Shrubs and Hedges by Eva Monheim, 2020

A practical, ordinary person's guide to choosing, planting, and caring for the world's most popular plants, Shrubs & Hedges delivers all the know-how you'll need to grow beautiful, healthy shrubs.

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#gardening
#plants
#shrubs
#hedges

aerial view of the wave ponds

#AerialView #Waves #Contained #Landscape #Ponds #Greenery #SymmetricalDesign #Hedges #Bushes #Trimmed #TopDownPerspective #Water #SandTextures #ControlNet #Img2Img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

get IRL: https://aieris.art/featured/aerial-view-of-the-wave-ponds-eris-and-ai.html