To Take or not to Take the Swine Flu Shot

I saw some interesting videos about the swine flu. One from the seventies is especially worth checking out: :
> http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9mh9f_swine-flu-1976-propaganda_webcam I did the math on it: 46 million people were inoculated against the flu and there were 4000 lawsuits by people who contracted Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which means about one in eleven thousand suffered enough to file a lawsuit. The question that's not answered is how many lives might have been saved among those who would have gotten the flu if they had not been given the shots. As always, it's a crap shoot. I once got very sick from a smallpox vaccination, but thank God I'm still around to tell about it.

A little info from the front lines. My daughter who is an attending physician working full-time in a Portland hospital told us she got a swine flue shot a few days ago. The shot takes about three weeks to become effective. According to her a lot more cases are beginning to show up day by day, and you can do a google on "frequency of swine flu cases" to see what the bigger picture is. Two women across the street from us came back early from a road-trip in their RV because one of them had contracted the swine flu. (She's recovering slowly.)

Of course, it always pays to be suspicious as long as somebody somewhere is out to make a buck, and there is money to be made in vaccine sales.

So what's the answer? The better informed you are from as many sources as possible and the more willing you are to do a little detective work, the better the odds you will make the right decision. It goes without saying that staying in good spirits is always conducive to your health. If things are getting you down, get in touch with a life coach.

Logical Support for Homeopathy

A sudden epiphany: My daughter Brigitte has been struggling with allergies for most of her life, and during a conversation with her I suddenly realized a simple reason why homeopathy is a valid approach to medicine. Allergies can be set off by minute quantities of a given substance, so minute in fact that a food product that was in contact with machinery used to process peanuts can cause a serious reaction for someone allergic to peanuts even after the machinery has been cleaned. Based on this one can reasonably conclude if the trace of an element of a substance can cause harm in someone in instances of allergies, trace elements of substances in homeopathic remedies can promote cures.

Will the Boomers Go Bust?

What Will Happen When the Baby Boomers Retire?

A retirement avalanche is about to descend. The baby boom began shortly after the end of World War II in 1945 and continued well into the 1950s. Numerically the boomers represent a work force of around 70 million, and those born earliest will be sixty-five in 2010. They are old enough to retire, but will they have the money for a living standard beyond that of the homeless?

The answer is no for most of them. Why not? Their parents for the most part retired in comfort as they could rely on company retirement plans. In those days, whether people worked for large or small companies, employers and employees felt they were part of the same family--employers held the role of ship captains and employees participated as loyal crews.

The picture began to change in the mid-seventies. A new breed of managers took over the leadership of corporations. The new business philosophy was for a company to make greater profits regardless of the means. Where once employees were part of a family engaged in a business venture, they now became nothing more than a cost factor, and costs are there to be cut. Now seen as nothing more than a financial burden, they can be eliminated by shutting down factories where they made a decent living and opening up plants in other countries where slave labor wages are the rule.

If a plant stays open, employees soon get the message that they had better accept cuts in health and pension benefits or lose their jobs. If a union threatens a strike, the employer lets workers walk out. If they don't buckle under, whatever service they provided is outsourced

Simply put, a good part of the baby boomers have by now either lost their jobs and/or retirement benefits, or if they are still working, had their benefits reduced so that they cannot possibly retire at any level above poverty.


Why Did the Baby Boomers Allow Themselves to be Reduced to Cost Factors?

The Cold War had broken out, and the power struggle between the communist authoritarian regimes and the militarily superior regimes of the west brought the world closer and closer to war. War needs anger, greed and hatred to thrive, but an unimaginable turn of events took place. As the east-west conflict heated up and America became increasingly involved in Vietnam, the baby boomers, rather than respond to a patriotic call to arms, answered with a message of love and peace. For a large segment of the population in their twenties and early thirties goals of acquiring wealth and career building were replaced by a quest for a peaceful and harmonious world.

When the Vietnam War was over and most civil rights goals were achieved, the generation that had pushed for change took a rest. This was not true, however, for a minority of boomers who had continued to pursue primarily careers and money. Without the distractions of idealistic goals, the acquisition of wealth for its own sake became fashionable and got increasing support from the media through programs like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." While the former hippies and war protesters did not necessarily join in the chase after money, they did not do much of anything to stop the greedy from their ever-greater worship of wealth and power. In a setting of general public complacency, it was easy for the power seekers to climb the corporate ladder by squeezing the incomes of all those on the rungs below them. Once they ruled the corporations, they got salaries and bonuses in the millions while others quietly lost their jobs and were too embarrassed to say or do anything about it.

No Work, No Money, No Retirement: Where Can You Go? How Can You Hide?

People are ashamed of being unemployed. Being broke may get you sympathy, but it won't get you respect. Having no retirement income will leave you either homeless or at the mercy of a relative. Civil servants, teachers or the career military are among the few who survive the race to the economic bottom. But those of the baby boomers who are neither wealthy nor part of a retirement system suddenly find themselves as part of a new underclass having to deal with the contempt of those who are better off. They now find themselves as outcasts much like the racial and ethnic minorities and women were before the civil rights movement.

So it becomes an irony of history that the baby boomers who did so much for the rights of the disadvantaged and in addition stopped a war, are now themselves confronted by a reality that they successfully defeated forty years earlier. Without jobs, no longer part of an "active society," they have little choice but to tap resources they have not drawn on since the early seventies. They cannot fail to recognize and face the fact that they can neither find jobs nor retire because the money they earned over their lifetimes is in the pockets of those addicted to power and greed. Considering that they are a generation of courage and innovation, they will through social and political action find ways to get back what has been taken from them. Given that the baby boomers are far better educated than earlier generations, given the fact that in their youth they were never afraid to challenge gratuitous authority, and given the fact that their personalities were developed in the period of greatest creativity, they will find the way to bring about the change needed for survival with dignity.

Letter to a Friend re Gun Confiscation

Dear D,

Yes, I feel compassion for gun owners. When we had the riots in 92 I drove out to the valley to buy an M1 carbine at a gun shop. They had a seven day waiting period for hand guns, but no waiting period for the M1 because it was considered an antique. Also, I had learned to fire it when I was in the military. A couple of years later it was ripped off when we had a burglary. The cops recovered it some time later, but I never retrieved it because they told me it had been mangled by the burglars.

As to my take on gun ownership, I see both sides of the issue. Guns, like cars, are potentially deadly weapons, and deadly weapons carry with them a grave (no pun intended) responsibility. The problem with car ownership is that cars kill people in accidents, not forgetting that cars can shorten the vehicle owners' life spans because they do not get enough exercise. Similarly, there is a major drawback to gun ownership. While car ownership creates problems by making locomotion all too easy, gun ownership often leads people to solving problems by shooting their opponents rather than calmly communicating with them.

Beyond that, I do consider it a serious problem that the government and big corporations stick their noses into citizens' business to the point where little privacy remains. It is my belief that privacy is a necessary element of freedom.

What's the answer? There needs to be a lot more dialog between those who want to keep guns and those who want to ban them. Underneath it all, I believe most of us want to make this world a better one.

Should We Love Our Greedy Neighbors?

Let's face it, there are some pretty nasty people out there, and for anyone following a Christian value system it is one's duty to love one's neighbor. Neighbor doesn't just mean the guy next-door but all human beings. As a Unitarian Universalist I admit that I may get into the Christian mode some of the time, but that other times I get into a mode where I want nothing more than to see justice done. This means that a part of me is waiting for that gleeful moment when one of the world's creeps, scum bags or douche bags gets a taste of his or her own medicine. Specifically, it may mean fantasizing about a healthcare CEO going to prison and suffering because he or she gets medical care no better than what other prisoners are getting. Can vengeance taste any sweeter?

It is easy to see people as villainous who become fabulously rich while finding ways to pay less and less of their fair share in taxes as they contribute next to nothing to society. Another good example might be a Wall Street charlatan who made millions gambling away people's retirement money, and who now struts about showing how proud he or she is because he or she lives in a fabulous mansion and drives the most expensive cars. Should one consider this kind of rip-off artist as evil as any thief or bank robber?

Whatever our moral appraisal of the well-heeled rascals may turn out to be, is it right for us to detest them? They may not at all be aware that they are doing wrong. They may believe it is right to take money from a public made up of fools who deserve to be ripped off. Is this kind of rationalization a sign of criminality or of a special kind of insanity? It depends on how you define the crime of theft. It depends a lot on a person's motive. Say somebody steals food or a small amount of money to feed a starving family. Yes it is wrong to steal, but it may be even more wrong to let someone die of starvation. Say someone steals money to buy drugs because he or she cannot bear the pain of withdrawal. Yes, it's wrong but understandable--people have limits as to how much pain they may be able to bear.

But what about multi-million-dollar rascals who pilfer ordinary people's money by means of the schemes and tricks of Wall Street? Are they ripping off the public in order to avoid unbearable pain? Yes and no. The experience of pain is relative: physical pain is undeniably direct. But the pain that the greedy may be trying to avoid is emotional: They avoid the pain of not being able to keep up with the Joneses, who they see as even richer than they. If the avoidance of pain is an emotional psychological affliction, and if the misappropriation of money crosses the boundaries of criminality, does it mean that the thief is an ordinary criminal, or that he or she is the victim of a newly discovered form of criminal insanity?

If multi-million-dollar scoundrels are indeed found to be suffering from a newly recognized form of criminal insanity, it would be very wrong to hate them because it is wrong to detest people who are afflicted with an illness. On the contrary, they deserve our feelings of compassion. But just as with other more commonly recognized forms of criminal insanity, such as killing committed by someone truly delusional, you cannot allow the individual in question to continue his or her misdeeds. Such people need to be stopped and institutionalized until the proper medical authority determines they have overcome their illness. As to the money taken by criminally insane multi-million-dollar rich and super-rich thieves, it should be returned to those that it has been taken from, and once this has happened we should not forget to think of them with the greatest possible compassion. And lest there be any doubt, compassion is a form of love.

Anything Goes for Profit?

I recommend that after you read my last post about not worrying about putting "healthcare providers" out of business, you check Bill Maher's discussion on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DOWJFiKeZQ

At the Center of the Healthcare Battle

What's at the basis of the health-care battle? It has become crystal clear that those intoxicated by greed do all they can to get their hands on more money. Universal healthcare means less money for private healthcare providers because a government-run program does not have to support an incredible load of pay going to executives nor does it have to pay out profits to investors. It would mean an extreme threat to corporations that take as much profit as they can by giving as little health care as possible for the fees and premiums they take in.

Healthcare costs have increased because hospitals and health insurance companies that existed to keep people alive and healthy have now became little more than a means of making money for corporate profiteers. When privatizers took over non-profit hospitals and insurance companies, they channeled cash to investors and corporate officers by cutting operating funds to doctors and nurses, eliminating necessary procedures whenever possible, and raising insurance premiums and fees to patients. Money that was used to heal the sick in non-profit systems, was now put into the pockets of corporate executives and profit-hungry investors.

True, non-profits have administrative structures in which those who are higher on the administrative scale get paid more. But for the most part, those on top of the ladder don't get the obscenely high salaries and bonuses customary in the corporate world. Instead, compensation with non-profits is roughly similar to that of the civil service system where those on top primarily get paid in accordance to a scale based on greater expertise and/or more experience. The civil service system is proof that managers who don't get outlandish compensations accomplish far more than those in for-profit corporations. Looking at the overall picture, corporate health-care executive pay is an unnecessary overhead, and eliminating it will benefit the essential components of health care, doctors, nurses, technicians and above all, the patients.