[MR Press blog posts should be listed on this page.]
February 20, 2024
“As an epidemiologist, you’re supposed to want to put yourself out of business,” Wallace said. “Everyone has bills to pay; I understand that. But the extent to which your corruption might lead to a pathogen that could kill a billion people—that’s where my line is”....“You can intellectually understand something but still not assimilate the oncoming damage,” he told me later, as he recalled the “sour vindication” of having his worst fears come true. “So there’s an aspect of rage, and an arrival at an understanding.”
February 20, 2024
Michael Heinrich "has a powerful critique of vulgar Marxism and the orthodoxies of the 19th and 20th centuries...Nerds, you're not going to want to miss this one!"
February 20, 2024
Dead Epidemiologists "speaks more plainly than academic jargon is wont to allow. Yet, in my view, this is one of the book’s biggest strengths. It makes the book accessible, and that accessibility is going to be important if we, as a global community, are to tackle the problem that Wallace and his colleagues articulate..."
February 20, 2024
It is worth summing up some of these key lies: 1) Venezuela was “once prosperous.” In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth; 2) Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo....
February 20, 2024
"I’m going to argue that it’s not only June 19, 1865, that we should mark, but also June 19, 1867, because that’s when the French leader Maximillian was killed. It marks the end of the attempt to continue our enslavement in Mexico. It’s a history that I would urge others to investigate...."
February 20, 2024
Marx’s reflections assume the existence of a money commodity, in this case gold. If a commodity functions as money, then the value of the money commodity is no more imaginary than the value of other commodities....
February 20, 2024
...in the service of besieged Venezuela, en route to Iran, another nation similarly blockaded by America, when he was intercepted by Cape Verde authorities and thrown into prison there....
February 20, 2024
Chavez inherited an impoverished country with a thin, glittering layer of affluence at the top. To the horror of Washington and Venezuelan plutocrats, he promptly began redistributing wealth to the poor...
February 20, 2024
Born in a Jim Crow hospital. Attended racially segregated “apartheid schools.” Grew up in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, an area similar to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and home to several prominent Black businesses that were erased forever by racially motivated construction projects...
February 20, 2024
Russell provides sound advice for those negotiating about the terms of these defined benefit plans, which still number 50,000 and have 60 million participants among active or retired workers. As he notes, in the current bargaining environment, “participants and their union representatives are more likely to be thinking defensively”...
