New York Times opinion piece on bullying, stressing the importance of education to change behavior.
It’s important, first, to recognize that while cellphones and the Internet have made bullying more anonymous and unsupervised, there is little evidence that children are meaner than they used to be. Indeed, there is ample research — not to mention plenty of novels and memoirs — about how children have always victimized one another in large and small ways, how often they are oblivious to the rights and feelings of others and how rarely they defend a victim.
In a 1995 study in Canada, researchers placed video cameras in a school playground and discovered that overt acts of bullying occurred at an astonishing rate of 4.5 incidents per hour. Just as interesting, children typically stood idly by and watched the mistreatment of their classmates — apparently, the inclination and ability to protect one another and to enforce a culture of tolerance does not come naturally. These are values that must be taught.
Yet, in American curriculums, a growing emphasis on standardized test scores as the primary measure of “successful” schools has crowded out what should be an essential criterion for well-educated students: a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others. …
As an essential part of the school curriculum, we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.
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The New Republic article, “Will Climate Change Lead to Mass Immigration from Mexico?,” is timely, given the prominence in the news of Arizona’s immigration law. The migration that will follow climate change is certainly an issue that should be kept in the public’s awareness.
The author, Bradford Plumer, points out that most climate-change induced migration will happen within developing countries – country folks from villages will move to urban centers. Historically this is nothing new.
Migration from one country to another is harder to predict. A powerful symbol of what to expect is the fence along the 2,500 mile border between India and Bangladesh. The majority of land in Bangladesh is less than 20 feet above sea level. By the end of the century, more than a quarter of the country will be under water. The fence will prevent migration to India.
Right-wing seeks common cause with environmentalists
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An article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande on how modern clinical medicine has turned death and dying into an experience we would not wish on our enemies. This is so much in need of being said. And heard, discussed, and acted upon.
Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop. …
Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.
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Considering the two wars were declared and waged with scant attention to their full costs, lawmakers add insult to injury by invoking budget concerns for the traumatic needs of actual warriors.
… “The real question is, why don’t we care anymore?”
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Why are we arguing the issue? Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy. Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments. In short, they are conservatives by training: never, ever risk overstating your ideas. The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well-funded. That smoking caused cancer was obfuscated deliberately and effectively for 20 years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. We know that for certain now, yet those who caused this fatal delay have never been held accountable. The profits of the oil and coal industry make tobacco’s resources look like a rounding error.
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The obstetrician–gynecologist opposes one of the fundamental assumptions of the new health care law – that physicians should be paid according to the quality of their work, not the quantity. How can you argue against the quality of health care? Burgess spoke on the subject at a recent Health Affairs Media Breakfast:
Burgess came to the defense of the current fee-for-service [FFS] system where the provider is paid for each individual service rendered to a patient. The congressman argued that doctors are “so goal directed that we need that impetus” of FFS as motivation to provide the best possible care.
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Try to Praise the Multilated World
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
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The researchers are hopeful that they can build on these initial findings to develop new uses for this potent ingredient in honey, and in light of an alarming trend of antibiotic-resistance, ultimately even put defensin-1 to use as an alternative to current antibiotics.
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In 1980 the historian G.S. Rousseau expressed concern that modern physicians no longer embodied the humanist tradition of their predecessors. Now that medicine had become overwhelmingly a science rather than an art, he claimed, the interests and accomplishments of physicians had narrowed.
It was not uncommon, for Victorian and Edwardian doctors … to write prolifically throughout their careers. … In twentieth-century America … only the most imaginative physicians can hope for this artistic lifestyle as a consequence of the economic constraints and housekeeping demands placed upon the doctor.
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Why My Wife Should Let Me Have a Dog
If I had a dog his soft fur would not foliate
the sofa or trigger asthma attacks
in my dear wife, ending with a hospital trip,
an adrenaline shot and those inhaler tubes
littering the house.
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There is harm
because there is this innocent animal,
the body;
because a baby’s unguarded gaze,
and the open regard
of animals both hold patience
with the world,
with mineral fact. Impenetrable
consciousness
arising from, locked into flesh.
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