Between 1985 and 2000, the retail price of carbonated soft drinks rose by 20%, the prices of fats and oils by 35%, and those of sugars and sweets by 46%, as compared with a 118% increase in the retail price of fresh fruits and vegetables. …
Healthy, low-calorie foods cost more money and take more effort to prepare than processed, high-calorie foods. … Drewnowski estimated that a calorie-dense diet cost $3.52 a day compared with $36.32 a day for a low-calorie diet.
A recent commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association asks: If individuals don’t use preventive services, “what kind of penalty … would be ethically and morally acceptable?” The question wasn’t “How do we account for unhealthy behavior,” but what punishment would be sufficient either to change that behavior or at least to save money by denying these people health care.
“Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked from his wheelchair.
The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.
The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years.
The preoccupation with female appearance encourages evaluation of women in terms of sexual attractiveness rather than character, competence, hard-work, or achievement. Although some women benefit from their beauty, it is not a stable form of self-esteem.
I noted that my judgmental reaction to another’s body was shaped by my coincidental assessment that surgeons work on conditions like that. Judgment conflates the body itself with the quality of work done on that body or the potential to have that work done. The possibility of fixing renders inescapable the question of whether or not to fix.
[T]here is an elision here between these women’s oppression and what the U.S. military presence can and should do about it, which in turn simplifies the complexities of the debate and turns it into, “Well, do you want to help Aisha or not?”
Few actual environmentalists want anything to do with these [right-wing] parties, and there doesn’t seem to be anything comparable in the United States, though if global warming does put pressure on immigration, it’s certainly possible that green nativists could find a toehold here.
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.
Try to Praise the Multilated World
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
Medical Futility Blog