Four Fish: There are many things — in my opinion — that recommend this book. The author has been fishing all his life and is at one with his subject. He doesn’t criticize fishermen, nor is he preachy about what consumers choose to eat. He doesn’t leave his reader with a sense of doom and gloom, a common aftertaste of books that document the extinction of species. Greenberg believes there’s still hope for the future of fish. He’s also a fabulous writer. That’s why I recommend the book highly.
Where was the medical profession? Doctors are supposed to feel an acute responsibility to deliver the best health service to the whole population. It is on this basis that they ask the public and government to support generous pay increases and terms and conditions of service. These attitudes and behaviours are what we commonly mean by professionalism. It seems that doctors failed completely to live up to the rhetoric of their commitment to professional values.
In most branches of medicine, we deal more commonly with old people. So we become much more enthusiastic when a young person comes along. We have more in common with and are more attracted to him or her. Doctors have a limited amount of time, so the younger and more attractive you are, the more likely you are to get more of our time.
While average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age.
Conservatives will not find it much easier than liberals to govern a society where so many people feel themselves cheated — and where so many refuse to believe that the so-called experts care for the interests of anyone beyond their narrow coterie and class.
Bangladeshi chest doctor Kazi Saifuddin Bennoor has seen many misleading cigarette advertisements, but the one that suggested smoking could make childbirth easier plumbed new depths. … “[I]f a lady smokes, her baby will be smaller and it will be easier to deliver, the labour will be less painful“.
The description of Rentokil’s Rodine Rat & Mouse poison includes the following assurance: “Contains natural whole wheat.” Doesn’t this take the sales appeal of healthy ingredients just a bit too far?
What are the mice and rats expected to make of this? Will the mummy and daddy rodents take the poison home and say to their children, “Eat up, it’s good for you. It’s made from whole wheat”? Or are the humans who use the poison supposed to feel good about killing small animals using healthy organic ingredients?
It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head.
The other day, I couldn’t find FuFu after the repairman left. I went out and did errands, came back, and still no FuFu. I walked around the house calling and whistling. The cats dislike whistling, and they usually come running to investigate the sound. Finally I heard a faint meow. I tracked it down to the area where the repairman had been working. It was coming from behind the wall!
Ultimately, decisions about a country’s health are not a matter of science, medicine, research, or scholarship. They are essentially political choices. When the US leans right, the solution to the health care crisis is to emphasize personal responsibility (aka prevention through healthy lifestyles). When the country leans left, there’s increased interest in the “negative externalities” of advanced market capitalism (pollution, climate change, ethnic inequities). Neither one is exclusively right or wrong. But when the political climate puts the spotlight on patients who are guilty of unhealthy lifestyles, the focus goes dim on those “fundamental mechanisms leading to disease” that have nothing to do with lifestyle. We lose sight of the genuine solutions that an increased focus on those mechanisms could provide.
Another great example of neoliberal insistence on personal responsiblity: In a 1980 report on the impact of carbon dioxide on climate change – a report requested by Congress – physicist and free-marketer William Nierenberg argued that we should do nothing to prevent climate change because people could simply migrate. “Not only have people moved [in the past], but they have taken with them their horses, dogs, children, technologies, crops, livestock, and hobbies. It is extraordinary how adaptable people can be.”
Here then, we have the highest court in the land saying that those poor people with pre-paid water meters must not think that their water supply has discontinued when their taps run dry because the meter has cut the supply … they must imagine that it is “temporarily suspended” until such time as they can find the money to buy more water credit or until the next month arrives. Such “logic” … is … an insult both to the poor and to the constitutional imperatives of justice and equality.
The supply of water was controlled by prepaid water meters that were installed for each household. Once the “free” allocation was exhausted, the water meters prevented additional water from flowing. That included emergency situations, such as the need to put out a fire. When a fire broke out in Phiri, an urban neighborhood of Soweto in Johannesburg, the outcome was tragic.
in the developing world, over a billion people lack access to safe drinking water. Many women spend over six hours a day collecting enough water for their families (and wait until after dark to relieve themselves). When it comes to sanitation, 2.6 billion do not even have access to “improved” pit latrines – open pits with simple modifications to reduce flies and odors.
From Buenos Aires to Atlanta to Jakarta, the liquid everybody needs–and will need a lot more of in the future–is going private, creating one of the world’s great business opportunities. The dollars at stake are huge. … Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations. … To turn a profit, [the privatizing corporation] must collect far more in water charges than it pays out in salaries, equipment, and interest.
