Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Dhruv Khullar interviews Ashish Jha about what’s to come in the COVID-19 pandemic – including the desperate need for mitigation measures to reduce an unsustainable amount of spread. And Alexander Quon reports on the increase in COVID deaths in Saskatchewan from 2021 to 2022
Continue readingTag: capitalism
THE FIFTH COLUMN: SocialCoin – The Socially Responsible Alternative to Bitcoin
I am placing this concept in the public domain for anyone with the necessary technical skills to create the structures and necessary algorithms to implement it. Wikipedia provides an extensive section on Bitcoin and in particular Bitcoin mining. Essentially Bitcoin is created by an energy wasting computer process they call
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Nathalie Schwab et al. study the results of autopsies, and find that COVID-19 appears to be the actual cause of death even for many patients treated as having died of other causes. Eva Hejbol et al. examine COVID’s wide range of effects on muscles as
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: How to Make Credit Card Purchases Safer – Banks, Are You Paying Attention
Do you worry about the security of your credit card information when you provide it to lesser known merchants to make payments ? Do you worry that the information you provide to well known major merchants could be stolen as their databases are hacked as seems to happen regularly ?
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – David Wallace-Wells examines the massive global toll of excess deaths from COVID-19 (likely far exceeding even the already-alarming official counts). Nele Brusselaers et al. examine how Sweden’s choice to ignore science in favour of wishcasting and a strategy of deliberate infection resulted in
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Neoliberal failures expose the need to defund the police
Police cannot ever solve broad social and political problems created by the neglect of the neoliberal state. They will forever be locked in a chase to find more crime which is continuously generated by our economic system. A dog chasing its tail. Alternatives must be found.
Continue readingKersplebedeb: NEW: Jane Austen Goes to School with the Lumpen/Proletariat – J. Sakai
A new pamphlet now available as a LeftWingBooks.net! There are many roads to understanding the root process of capitalist criminalization, but one of the most direct is surprisingly the classic women’s novelist, Jane Austen. This article, first published as a chapter in the book The Dangerous Class and Revolutionary Theory:
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – C Raina MacIntyre offers five reasons to keep wearing a mask even after mandates are removed – and the arguments are even more compelling in areas where waves of infections are still in progress. And Elizabeth Yuko reports on the victims of
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Making sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
What has become clear is that Canadian and American media are manufacturing consent, and presenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine outside of its historical context. The act of invasion is 100% Vladimir Putin’s decision, and the invasion was not justified. At the same time, the conditions that led to this
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Pierre Poilievre is no friend of the working class, despite his pro-worker ranting
Poilievre’s announcement to run as Prime Minister touches on working-class issues, with a mood of plausible, genuine sincerity. He even mentions the working class by name. Of course, Poilievre doesn’t care about the working class at all. His solution to alleviating poverty in Canada is to put the social welfare
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: The truckers convoy promotes social harm, not “mandating freedom.”
The organizers of the covid convoy have been demanding they speak to the manager of Canada. While they claim to fight for freedom and “vaccine choice,” this couldn’t be further from the truth. What all the elements within the spectrum of supporters of the convoy have in common is the
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Top Banking CEO blames workers’ wages for causing inflation
In the end, workers are attacked on two fronts via inflation rhetoric. First, by banking CEO’s who claim workers make too much money, and second, by the Conservatives who claim that they received too much government support during the pandemic.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Alex Ballingall and Raisa Patel ask why Canada’s federal government seems to have learned nothing from four previous waves of COVID. And Kari Dequine Harden writes about the large number of children saddled with the effects of long COVID because their leaders
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Don’t just blame the anti-vaxxers, blame our political elites too
Justin Trudeau has chosen to place all of the blame on the unvaccinated for the current spike in cases and hospitalizations. The problem is, this is only a half-truth. It is political scapegoating. The other half of the problem is Trudeau himself – and the rest of Canada’s political elites
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Time to Talk About Wage Theft
Over at Popular Information they juxtapose two crimes that happened last year: the stealing of retail goods by one person valued between $200-$950 and the other crime by one corporation was the stealing of people’s money valued at $4,500,000. One got a lot of news coverage while the other did
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Businesses received $26 billion more in pandemic relief money than individuals
The influence of the private sector paid off for business owners, as they received more pandemic relief money collectively than individuals did. Justin Trudeau’s federal government came out with a slew of programs to help those in Canada, but many of these predominantly favoured employers. According to a new CCPA
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: LTC Homes: Ownership Matters
Nancy Olivieri, Michael Hurley, Vivian Stamatopoulos, and Natalie Mehra explained Doug Ford’s sneaky passing of Bill 37 just before Christmas in today’s Toronto Star. They warn, “Hope to live out your old age in dignity and comfort? Think again.” Ford doesn’t want us to know what’s been stolen from Ontarians.
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: How capitalism made the pandemic worse, every step of the way
The internal logic of capitalism has tainted our government’s response to the pandemic. Corporate profits were preserved, while the interests of the working class were disregarded. Pandemic austerity and vaccine nationalism were the primary themes of government responses, and have grave consequences for the working class and health of humanity.
Continue readingNorthern Currents –: Conservative Premier Scott Moe sides with Big Oil campaign, ignores the climate crisis
Regina city councillors proposed legislation to ban advertisements from oil and gas industry. The industry responded with an astroturfing campaign. Here we have yet another example of right-wing politicians supporting powerful oil and gas corporations. These corporations are so powerful that they can shape narratives and create false populist movements.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Katherine Wu, Ed Yong and Sarah Khang write that the Omicron COVID-19 wave is seeing governments make the same familiar mistakes in an accelerated time frame, while Umair Haque laments the continued combination of incompetence, ineptitude and indifference. And the Star’s editorial board
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