9 May 2021 — Counter Currents
by Kim Petersen
A video in which Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev is interviewed by Orla Guerin has resurfaced; the interview took place in November 2020. (The BBC version.)
Revealing is what is not seen in the BBC version. When Aliyev held up the mirror to Guerin’s “accusation” that there was no free media in Azerbaijan, the BBC responded by censoring Aliyev’s reference to Assange.
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7 May 2021 — MROnline
Originally published: Andy Merrifield Blog (September 29, 2019)
The longest chapter in Capital is the fifteenth, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.” At almost 150-pages, it’s really a book in itself, a staggeringly dense and expansive discussion that could easily standalone—not only as a brilliant exegesis of capitalist machinery, but also as a sweeping social history of technology. At its broadest reach, the chapter is a vivid demonstration of historical materialism in action, of Marx’s method put through its dialectical paces. As ever with Marx, his footnotes aren’t to be passed over glibly: they’re worth studying, pondering over for the nuggets of insight they contain.
9 May 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog
Is inflation coming back in the major capitalist economies? As the US economy (in particular) and other major economies begin to rebound from the COVID slump of 2020, the talk among mainstream economists is whether inflation in the prices for goods and services in those economies is going to accelerate to the point where central banks have to tighten monetary policy (ie stop injecting credit into the banking system and raise interest rates). And if that were to happen, would it cause a collapse in the stock and bond markets and bankruptcies for many weaker companies as the cost of servicing corporate debt rises?
8 May 2021 — Tap News
Legal precedent set. The Swedish Public Health Agency has developed national criteria for assessing freedom from infection in covid-19.
The Swedish Public Health Agency has developed national criteria for assessing freedom from infection in covid-19.
The PCR technology used in tests to detect viruses cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralized by the immune system and therefore these tests cannot be used to determine whether someone is contagious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness but does not mean that you are still contagious. There are also several scientific studies that suggest that the infectivity of covid-19 is greatest at the beginning of the disease period.
9 May 2021 — Tony Greenstein’s Blog
9 May 2021 — Dr Sebastian Rushworth, M.D.
Back in January I wrote an article about four randomized controlled trials of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19 that had at that time released their results to the public. Each of those four trials had promising results, but each was also too small individually to show any meaningful impact on the hard outcomes we really care about, like death. When I meta-analyzed them together however, the results suddenly appeared very impressive. Here’s what that meta-analysis looked like:
It showed a massive 78% reduction in mortality in patients treated with covid-19. Mortality is the hardest of hard end points, which means it’s the hardest for researchers to manipulate and therefore the least open to bias. Either someone’s dead, or they’re alive. End of story.
7 May, 2021 — Peoples Dispatch
George Mqapheli Bonono, the deputy president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, was arrested on May 4. The movement maintains that it is a politically motivated attempt by the police to discredit the organization at the behest of the ruling ANC
George Mqapheli Bonono addressing the AbM’s heritage week celebration in 2019. Photo : New Frame
The New Dark Age 