This week, I have been mostly researching for an essay, but when feeling naughty I've been reading:

• Why Some Students Are Ditching America for Medical School in Cuba — Sarah Zhang in WIRED: Consider Cuba’s medical system, which punches far above its weight. The country’s GDP per is just one-tenth of the US’s, and it lacks access to drugs and equipment thanks to the US trade embargo. But life expectancy in Cuba is actually just above that of its northern neighbor. How? By focusing on preventive medicine for everyone under a national healthcare system.
• How Gates' Billions Silences Criticism of His Development Agenda — Nick Dearden, Common Dreams: Initiatives that Gates funds push intensive farming methods involving plenty of chemicals and privatisation of seed distribution. Time and again, these ‘solutions’ have proved disastrous for small farmers, allowing big players to effectively control the whole food system. They also ramp up global carbon emissions and fuel global warming. But they are exactly what big business wants. In fact, Gates aid sometimes looks designed to help agribusiness develop new markets – like a project with agro-giant Cargill which helped it develop soya ‘value chains’ in Africa. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply how Gates, like so many of his fellow plutocrats, believe the world works. Big business invents useful stuff and drive growth. Let’s help them and everyone will be better off.
• The Mythology of Selfishness — Mary Midgley in The Philosophers Magazine: Our own thoughts and feelings – the constant flow of inner activity by which we respond to the life around us – also affect the world as well as our outward actions. This thought is so frightening that scholars will often go to any lengths to avoid it, which is why that ludicrous doctrine epiphenomenalism still has supporters, and why people spend so much more of their time on sociological statistics, neurological details and speculation about evolutionary function than on studying motive.
• The Death of Capitalism — Ian Welsh: If you were 30 in 1980, you are 66 today. If you were 40, you are 76. If you were in the decision making class, overwhelmingly allocated to those who were 50+ in 1980, you are 86 today. People who were in their prime and during their decision-making days, when we needed to act on climate change, were making a DEATH BET. They bet they would be dead before the worst results of climate change happened. They will win this bet. This was a RATIONAL thing for them to do. I want to repeat that, because too many people think “rational=good.” It does not. It was rational for them to discount a future they would not see. Also, What Is Capitalism?: The responses to my article The Death of Capitalism made something clear: Most people don’t know what Capitalism is. [The argument is a thoughtful one, but I have a simpler definition: Capitalism is a doctrine which frames all human activity in terms of investment and return.]
• The Volcanic Core Fueling the 2016 Election — Robert Reich: I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.
• Consumer credit and mortgage finance in the 1920s — Matias Vernengo at Naked Keynesianism: The Great Depression put an end to the roaring 20s. The unsustainable expansion of consumer credit and mortgages seems to have played, as much as in the last crisis, a significant role.
• How Long Will Your Class Remain Yours? Academic Freedom and Control of the Classroom — Jonathan Rees in Hybrid Pedagogy: An LMS not only mediates and records all interactions between teachers and students in both the online classes and face-to-face classes that utilize it, but it also represents a teaching worldview all by itself. As Jim Groom and Brian Lamb explain, “[B]efore we even begin to encounter the software itself, we privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a ‘system’ to ‘manage’ it. This mindset and its resulting values result in online architectures that prioritize user management, rigidly defined and restricted user roles, automated assessments, and hierarchical, topdown administration.” Trying to control your own virtual classroom in this environment is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. You know you’re going to lose before the fighting starts, so why bother? And from the linkage therein:
• Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Learning Management (#moocmooc) — by Sean Michael Morris, who ordinarily would have lost me at the word "critical": The advent of online learning has introduced a new level of data and measurement (also, fucking absurdity) into education. With the learning management system (LMS) comes the ability to track all kinds of information about student performance, participation, and more. At the LMS company where I worked until recently, educational research often focused on the activity of learners on pages, watching videos, taking and passing quizzes, participating in or starting discussions in the forum, and other minutiae. It’s possible to track time on page, time in the course, and the “bounce rate” for learners in their courses. In effect, the research being done isn’t about learning, it’s about surveillance, about observing the learner in the way we might a rat in a maze.