Archive for October 2025

The National Association of Social Workers, California Chapter (NASW-CA), is calling for sweeping child welfare reform following a devastating California State Auditor report that found Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) failed to adequately protect the state’s children.

In virtually every dimension of the penal state, from policing, through prosecution and sentencing, all the way to prison and collateral consequences, the US is not just at the top of the league — it’s an outlier.

Margarita Moreno works at the mail room in the Phoenix campus of Keys to Change, a collaborative of 15 nonprofit organizations that serve homeless people.

She took Inuit studies at Nunavut Sivuniksavut College in Ottawa. Then transferred from Carleton University to Laurentian University for its Indigenous social work program. Just last week she had her convocation at Wilfrid Laurier University where she graduated with a masters in social work.

This isn’t science fiction. On Sept. 29, 2025, OpenAI and payment processor Stripe launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol. This technology lets you buy things instantly from Etsy within ChatGPT conversations. ChatGPT users are scheduled to gain access to over 1 million other Shopify merchants, from major household brand names to small shops as well…. AI shopping assistants are evolving through three phases. First came “on-demand AI.” You ask ChatGPT a question, it answers. That’s where most people are today.
Now we’re entering “ambient AI,” where AI suggests things before you ask. ChatGPT monitors your calendar, reads your emails and offers recommendations without being asked. Soon comes “autopilot AI,” where AI makes purchases for you with minimal input from you.

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools….Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Writing in the medical journal Post Reproductive Health, a group of academics warned recently of a “menopause gold rush” leaving women vulnerable to financial exploitation, misinformation and, frankly, a sweat-inducingly gigantic avalanche of advertising…. The academics warned of “a rapid expansion in unregulated private companies and individuals providing menopause information and support for profit”. So now, instead of talking about the treatment and management of menopause, we are talking about how to cope with an equally pernicious condition and one that seems to have no cure or end: the ubiquitous commercialisation of menopause.