Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Ed Yong writes about the need for people to keep caring for and protecting each other to make up for being abandoned by business-driven politicians in the middle of a deadly and debilitating pandemic. Olivia Bowden discusses the considerations surrounding booster vaccine doses which do require government involvement. And Victor Castro-Gutierrez et al. study the connection between school infections and community spread (showing a clear pattern of the former driving the latter), while Sandra Lopez-Leon et al. examine (PDF) the long COVID symptoms suffered by children. 

- Stephanie Kelton writes that interest rate hikes and austerity are the hydroxychloroquine cure for inflation (i.e. quackery being pushed by the right as a substitute for viable measures which don't suit their political purposes), while the effective medicine of taxing windfall profits is being conspicuously left off the table. And TVO interviews Mike Moffatt about the glaring need for action to make housing remotely affordable for the people who need it most. 

- Jeremy Appel exposes how Amazon is trying to intimidate its workers in Quebec - but notes that it's also finding more resistance there than in some places. 

- Malcolm James, Jane Kenway and Rebecca Boden highlight how private schools in the UK use public money to create educational and social inequality. 

- Finally, David Fraser reports on the launch of the Ottawa People's Commission to report on the city's occupation. Jonathan Montpetit reports on the threats being made against libraries by convoy-affiliated bigots attempting to silence any voices which don't share their hostility to LGBTQ+ people. And Robert Reich writes about the roots of the U.S. Trumpism which is bleeding into Canada. 

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 didn't bother to keep public health protections in place for the benefit of those who couldn't yet be vaccinated.

- Umair Haque discusses how the U.S.' elite consensus around unrestrained capitalism has led to its political ruin - and while the U.S. may stand out for now, it's not hard to see the same dynamic playing out in Canada and elsewhere. And Elizabeth Meager points out that investor protection agreements have been treated as barring countries from meeting their climate commitments. 

- Meanwhile, Phil MacDonald and Sarah Brown note that soaring energy costs in the UK are the result of continued reliance on fossil fuels. And Marc Fawcett-Atkinson writes that access to safe food is just one more area in which inequality of income and wealth feeds into disparities in other aspects of well-being.

- Finally, Stephanie Kelton discusses the dangers of treating reflexive interest rate manipulation as the only - or best - means of responding to inflation.