[Marxism] Beethoven: the politics of a musical revolutionary | Thomas Gibbs | Counterfire

2020-05-09 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21184-beethoven-the-politics-of-a-musical-revolutionary


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[Marxism] Unsurvivable heat extremes have emerged earlier than expected: study - The Washington Post

2020-05-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Every time I see a new report, surprise is registered at how much 
reality exceeds expectations. And mass migration emerges more urgently 
with each successive pile-on.


["...researchers were surprised to find such sharp increases in moist 
heat waves in part because computer model projections don’t show these 
occurrences becoming common for a few more decades"...it is disturbing 
to see it happening in real time. It will only get worse and more 
widespread from here." "The computed heat index [in Bandar Mahshahr, a 
city in southwest Iran] for this brutal combination was 165 degrees (74 
Celsius), among the highest recorded. However, the National Weather 
Service cautions such conditions are so extreme that they are beyond the 
limit the heat index was designed to calculate..."“Of all of the climate 
risks coming this century, the thing I am most concerned about is 
excessive heat in the tropics,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist 
emeritus at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, 
in an email. “Rich countries have brought much of their economy indoors 
where air conditioning is a possibility, but many developing economies 
rely on labor-intensive outdoor agriculture,” he wrote. “The combination 
of poverty and extreme temperatures can be lethal...would make 
agriculture that relies on outdoor picking impossible. ”]



Unsurvivable heat extremes have emerged earlier than expected: study
Andrew Freedman, Jason Samenow - The Washington Post - Friday, May 8, 2020

Welcome to “Steambath Earth,” featuring sauna-like temperatures and 
humidity too high for humans to tolerate.
Extremely humid heat that is more intense than most Americans have 
experienced — approaching a crucial, immovable human survivability limit 
— has more than doubled in frequency in some coastal subtropical regions 
of the world since 1979, according to a new study published Friday.
The study is the first to find that wet bulb temperatures of 95 degrees 
(35 Celsius), which renders ineffective the human heat response of 
sweating to shed heat through evaporation, leading to hyperthermia, are 
already occurring for short periods of time at a few weather stations.
These tend to be located in parts of the Persian Gulf shoreline and 
coastal southwest North America, where sizzling lands border sultry 
seas, as well as in northern South Asia, where extreme heat and humidity 
combinations overlap just before the annual monsoon begins.
With computer model projections showing the world will continue to warm 
rapidly in response to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere, the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, 
warns that highly populated regions of the world will be rendered 
uninhabitable sooner than previously thought for parts of each year.
This will come to pass unless people take wide-ranging and costly steps 
to adapt to the heat during the next few decades, while nations 
undertake measures to slash emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study depicts a world steadily marching toward a future in which 
many locations approach or reach that survivability threshold, as well, 
a trend that could throw a spotlight on the divide between rich nations 
that are able to adapt to this new reality and poor countries that 
suffer productivity losses and deaths.
The heat in the subtropics constitutes a threat to global stability, 
some researchers say, since they could prompt millions to become climate 
migrants, searching for more temperate conditions elsewhere.
For the research, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and 
Columbia University examined surface temperature data around the world 
on land and sea. They detected, for the first time, the arrival of what 
some scientists have called “Steambath Earth,” with heat waves that 
humans cannot survive after prolonged exposure.
The threshold for survivability occurs when the wet bulb temperature 
hits 95 degrees (35 Celsius).
Meteorologists measure wet bulb temperatures by wrapping a wet wick 
around the bulb of a thermometer. While it may seem to be an esoteric 
figure, it’s highly significant in heat wave situations, since the 
higher the wet bulb temperature gets, the more difficult it becomes for 
the human body to shed metabolic heat into the air through the 
evaporation of sweat.
In fact, mortality increases during heat waves when wet bulb 
temperatures reach temperatures of 88 to 91 degrees (31 to 33 Celsius), 
the study states.
According to study co-author Radley Horton of Columbia University, the 
combination of high temperature with high humidity is, “Maybe the most 
underappreciated of the direct 

[Marxism] Rewind | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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“Rewind,” a powerful documentary about the sexual abuse of children, was 
initially scheduled to open in theaters on March 27th at the IFC Center 
in New York, and April 3rd in Los Angeles, with a national rollout to 
follow. However, like all other film releases nationwide, the movie’s 
theatrical opening was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Like 
other films I have been covering since early April, it is now available 
as VOD as well as to be shown on PBS’s Independent Lens on May 11th 
(complete screening information at www.rewinddocumentary.com).


The film was directed by Sasha Joseph Neulinger, the 30-year-old 
filmmaker who, along with his sister, was molested repeatedly by two 
uncles and a cousin. The film is structured as a kind of deeply personal 
series of recollections by Sasha and his rueful mother and father who 
failed to intervene.


“Rewind”, as the title implies, conflates his memories with the action 
taken on a VCR to go backward. It becomes clear from the start of the 
film that his family was obsessed with home recordings that serve as the 
narrative thread that ties this horrifying family drama together. At the 
beginning of “Anna Karenina”, Tolstoy writes, “All happy families are 
alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” One might surmise 
that when sexual abuse takes place, each tale has its own peculiar 
twist. In Sasha’s family, there was a big appetite for mugging for the 
videocamera and competition as to who could be the most “entertaining”.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/09/rewind/

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[Marxism] [UCE] Webinar today, 7 pm EDT - SHINING THE LIGHT ON CUBA'S MEDICAL SOLIDARITY

2020-05-09 Thread Art Young via Marxism
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Earlier this week I posted an announcement of the Webinar "SHINING THE LIGHT ON 
CUBA'S MEDICAL SOLIDARITY" that will take place this Saturday evening. David 
Duport followed up with a question, "Cuba still charges host countries for 
these medical missions, right?" 

It's an important question that others have raised as well. Several list 
subscribers have weighed in on the matter, but I think that more can and should 
be said. Cuba's outstanding demonstration of medical internationalism during 
the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn world attention, provoking astonishment and 
admiration from many, and hostility and alarm from reactionaries in many 
quarters. The Trump administration is continuing to pressure countries to 
refuse Cuban offers of medical assistance. It has stepped up its campaign of 
lies and slanders about the island's international solidarity efforts. 

Turning to David's question, let's begin by noting that one core principle of 
the Cuban medical missions is that Cuban international assistance does not 
depend on the host country's ability to pay. A sliding scale is applied, and 
many countries where Cuban doctors and nurses serve, pay little or nothing. The 
case of Bolivia is instructive. Shortly after Evo Morales was elected president 
in 2006, Cuba began providing medical services to the country. The Cubans went 
to areas that had never seen a doctor or a nurse. Cuba covered the full cost of 
its medical missions. Over time, the Bolivian economy prospered while Cuba 
encountered serious economic problems. The terms of the agreement were then 
revised, and Bolivia began to pay some or all of the cost of the medical 
services from Cuba. (After the coup against Morales last October, the new 
authorities expelled the Cuban medical staff and terminated the agreement.)

Another principle that Cuba insists on is that, however the host country's 
health system may be organised, the Cuban health workers do not charge their 
clients or patients for their services. Medical care is free to those who need 
it.

Here I’d like to turn the floor over to a representative of the Cuban 
government. On Wednesday, in a live-streamed interview with CODEPINK, Cuba's 
Ambassador to Canada Josefina Vidal explained how her country finances the 
international medical missions, and what it does with the payments that it 
receives for their services. See https://tinyurl.com/ybpn8dyf . The portion 
dealing with the question of funding begins at approximately 16:00.

(In a previous assignment, Josefina Vidal led the Cuban side in the 
negotiations with the Obama administration that resulted in the breakthrough in 
US-Cuban relations that were announced on December 17, 2014.)

Another reliable source is the Canadian professor John Kirk. As Richard Fidler 
has noted, a recent interview with Kirk appears at 
https://johnriddell.com/2020/04/08/cubas-unique-model-of-medical-internationalism/
 . Kirk's explanation is the same as Vidal's. For those interested in looking 
into Cuban medical internationalism in greater depth, I recommend Kirk's 2015 
book, "Healthcare without Borders".

Fortunately, both Josefina Vidal and John Kirk will participate as panelists 
during the webinar on Saturday night. An ample period for Q is planned, so 
anyone who wishes will be able to take up this question with them. The webinar 
will begin at 7 pm Eastern Time; registration is via 
https://tinyurl.com/ycg3frnx .

Art Young

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[Marxism] From a forthcoming article on socialist economic planning

2020-05-09 Thread Jim Farmelant via Marxism
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>From a rough draft of a forthcoming article on socialist economic planning 
>being written with Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina  and Brendan Sullivan.
--
Visions of Socialism:

One of the most striking phenomena in US politics since the 2008 economic crash 
has been a revival of interest in socialism, especially among the Millennial 
generation. In fact, you would have to go back some eighty or more years ago to 
see a time when there was such a big interest in socialism. Even in the 1960’s, 
the last period when we saw the flourishing of major leftist political 
movements , there wasn’t so much a mass interest in socialism as much as there 
were movements led by people who identified as socialists or communists. Most 
public discussion then was over things like civil rights, black power, and 
opposition to the Vietnam War. There wasn’t that much talk as to what a 
socialist alternative to capitalism would look like, even though many political 
activists back then would have described themselves as being anti-capitalist.

It must be said that up to now, things haven’t seemed all that different. As 
much as half of the Millennial generation, according to recent opinion polls, 
seems willing to identify as socialists. Yet, it is not at all clear as to what 
they mean by that term. Do they mean an economic order where the means of 
production are owned by workers and their use is the product of democratic 
deliberation, as Marx stated “a community of associated producer” (the classic 
definition)? Or do they mean a more humane capitalism with a more generous 
welfare state - more or less like what exists (and is being meticulously 
disassembled) in the Scandinavian countries?

Right now, a major candidate in the race to become the Democratic Party’s 
presidential nominee in 2020, Bernie Sanders, calls himself a socialist. But 
what does he mean by that? It would seem that for him, socialism is basically 
just the liberalism of FDR and Truman, something that he has reiterated time 
and time again in his speeches. So is socialism nothing more than a revival of 
the liberal reformism of FDR, or God forbid, JFK? For many, that is perhaps all 
they mean by the term. A matter of pouring old wine into new bottles, while 
sticking on somewhat misleading labels.

Having said that, it is evident that many people are seeking something more 
radical than that. In the face of the environmental threats being posed by 
climate change, not to speak of the ever increasingly growth of economic 
inequality, reaction, racism and sexism, it doesn’t seem that a revival of 
FDR’s liberalism is a panacea. In other words, it doesn’t seem to be enough to 
just seek a reformed capitalism. That has been tried before, and we have seen 
that while in the short and medium run, capitalists can acquiesce when reforms 
are legislated, they will, over the long run, seek to gut and overturn them. 
This is the confirmed history of social democratic reforms, a history that has 
played out in the US and most other industrial countries over the last 50 years.

So, what is to be done? It is clear that at least a sizable minority of the 
people who now identify as socialists are in fact seeking a new economic order 
to replace capitalism outright. This entails that working people will actually 
own the means of production and the market economy that we have now will be 
replaced by a planned economy.



Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math


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[Marxism] Who Sabotaged the American Economy? Thorstein Veblen Knows - Los Angeles Review of Books

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-sabotaged-the-american-economy-thorstein-veblen-knows/

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[Marxism] The Pandemic Jobless Youthquake | David Blanchflower | The New York Review of Books

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/08/the-pandemic-jobless-youthquake/

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[Marxism] Still Facing Reality: A Reply to Our Critics - New Politics

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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By Ashley Smith and Charles Post

https://newpol.org/still-facing-reality-a-reply-to-our-critics/

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[Marxism] Nae Hauf-Way Hoose: Tradition and Liberation: a memory of Neil Davidson (1957 - 2020)

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://naehauf-wayhoose.blogspot.com/2020/05/tradition-and-liberation-memory-of-neil.html

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[Marxism] Putin's People by Catherine Belton review – a groundbreaking study that follows the money | Books | The Guardian

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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A renowned business journalist who spent years covering Russia for the 
Financial Times, Belton follows the money. She has an unrivalled command 
of the labyrinthine history of share schemes, refinancing packages, 
mergers, shell companies, and offshore accounts that lay bare the 
stealthy capture of the post-Soviet economy and state institutions by a 
coterie of former KGB officers, or siloviki. Belton combines this 
financial history with testimony from a dazzling array of Kremlin 
insiders, diplomats, intelligence officers, prosecutors, mobsters and 
oligarchs. The result reads at times like a John le Carré novel.


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/06/putins-people-by-catherine-belton-review-a-groundbreaking-study-that-follows-the-money

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[Marxism] Call for academic solidarity – Kritikai földrajzok

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Support professor victimized by Orban in Hungary.

https://kritikaifoldrajz.hu/2020/05/04/call-for-academic-solidarity/

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[Marxism] Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plandemic,’ the coronavirus conspiracy video just banned from social media?

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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(Gee, I wonder if she hasn't written something about false flag chemical 
attacks in Syria for Grayzone by now.)


Washington Post, May 9, 2020
Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plandemic,’ the coronavirus conspiracy video 
just banned from social media?

By Katie Shepherd

When Judy Mikovits co-wrote a 2009 research paper that linked the 
mysterious condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome to a retrovirus 
that came from mice, thousands of sick patients hoping for relief 
rallied behind her. The scientific riddle was solved, they thought.


Less than two years later, those hopes were dashed when follow-up 
studies failed to replicate the findings and the respected journal 
“Science” retracted the paper. Researchers posited that the study’s 
inaccurate conclusions were the result of contamination of the lab 
samples, and the theory that a virus might be the source of the 
still-mysterious condition died.


But Mikovits’s conviction that her theory was correct, and her belief 
that the top scientific minds in the United States conspired to ruin her 
career, never faded.


She has now accused the scientific establishment of conspiracy again. In 
a film called “Plandemic,” and in a recently published book that topped 
the Amazon bestsellers chart this week, she makes a bizarre and false 
claim: that the doctors and experts shaping public policy in response to 
the novel coronavirus pandemic have silenced dissenting voices and 
misled the public for sinister reasons.


She falsely claims that wealthy people intentionally spread the virus to 
increase vaccination rates and that wearing face masks is harmful.


The coronavirus-related theories Mikovits presented defy accepted 
science and wilt under scrutiny, according to dozens of experts who 
spoke up after “Plandemic” trended this week.


Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. 
All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.


The film is so questionable that social media platforms including 
Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo on Thursday scrubbed it from their sites. A 
Vimeo spokesperson, for example, said that the company “stands firm in 
keeping our platform safe from content that spreads harmful and 
misleading health information. The video in question has been removed … 
for violating these very policies.”


It was the latest chapter in the saga of Mikovits’s troubled career.

In the years after the 2009 study was retracted, Mikovits was fired from 
her job leading a research institute, arrested for theft and sued by her 
former employer. Meanwhile, she doubled down on debunked theories 
linking retroviruses that originated in mice to medical conditions such 
as chronic fatigue syndrome and autism.


In the absence of crucial evidence of how the new coronavirus began 
comes many theories — one is that the virus accidentally escaped from a 
lab in Wuhan, China. (Sarah Cahlan, Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
In response to an inquiry from The Washington Post, Mikovits said she 
could not participate in an interview until after Mother’s Day but 
offered up a PowerPoint presentation that she claimed backed up the 
allegations she made in “Plandemic.”


She acknowledged her past legal troubles — including the arrest — in the 
film, but suggested her woes stem from an alleged conspiracy to crush 
her once-promising career and destroy her credibility as a scientist.


Mikovits also flung false and wild allegations at several high-profile 
scientists in “Plandemic,” including Anthony S. Fauci, director of the 
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of 
the White House coronavirus task force. In the weeks before the 
“Plandemic” trailer launched, she had been positioning herself as an 
expert and an anti-Fauci voice in interviews with conspiracy-hawking and 
far right-leaning websites like the Epoch Times and the Gateway Pundit.


Mikovits, who graduated with a PhD in biochemistry from George 
Washington University, spent 22 years working for the National Cancer 
Institute. She left that job in 2001, and the New York Times reported in 
a 2009 profile that Mikovits moved from Maryland to California to work 
for a drug company that later failed. She ended up bar tending for a 
yacht club, the Times reported, before she was recruited to helm a 
privately funded research clinic, Whittemore Peterson Institute, which 
was dedicated to finding the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome.


After other scientists failed to replicate Mikovits’s research on 
chronic fatigue syndrome, her employers at the Whittemore Peterson 
Institute in Nevada fired her in October 2011, “Science” magazine 
reported, though 

[Marxism] De Blasio Shrugs Off Leaked Data Showing Massive Racial Disparities In NYPD's Social Distancing Arrests - Gothamist

2020-05-09 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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This fucking Mayor De Blasio used to show up at Nicaragua Network 
meetings in 1988. What a phony.


https://gothamist.com/news/de-blasio-shrugs-leaked-data-showing-massive-racial-disparities-nypds-social-distancing-arrests

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