Now what do you know about this?
WASHINGTON President Barack Obama told voters repeatedly during the health care debate that the overhaul legislation would bring down fast-rising health care costs and save them money. Now, he’s hemming and hawing on that.
He’s such a tease.
Wed. Journal letter writer Tom Ard, promoting the single-payer system, says, “Health is an area where capitalism harms us.”
To which I: “Maybe there’s some common-ground possibility here. Where does it not harm (help) us? And how? Could Tom elaborate?”
We might get down to basics with such a discussion.
Red meat today for angry blacks and guilty whites in Chi Trib’s hard copy p-1 headline story, “The transplant gap keeps more blacks waiting for kidneys,” by Deborah Shelton.
The story is another in a line of “makes me want to holler” items that regularly feed black resentment and white-liberal anguish, recounting in excruciating, montonous detail what’s wrong with organ transplantation in this country as regards racial disparity.
Read it and weep, whether from anger or guilt or ennui compounded with disgust at colorized journalism meant to feed the race-complaint machine — rather plant, like Audrey in “Little Shop of Horrors” : “Feeeeeed me!”
At least in the Metro section’s page-one story about bicycle messengers with its bike-messenger viewpoint lede, we read also about drivers and pedestrians’ complaints about cyclist’s recklessness and flouting of traffic rules. In this kidney-transplant story, on the other hand, we get almost all quotes and notations in support of What a Damn Shame This Is.
African-Americans account for 37 percent of people receiving dialysis but make up only 19 percent of the transplant population, according to the United States Renal Data System, a government database.
This is news? Over– and under-representation of blacks in bad (as incarceration) and good (academic achievement) has been trumpeted with indignation, but never going beyond that and white American responsibility for it all. Or is it propaganda?
Responsibility, thy color is white, is the message. If you’re black, step back from responsibility, for this and a dozen other bad situations. A very bad message for all concerned.
Like milk? The whole near-creamy variety that brings a smile to your face? But you dasn’t drink it for health reasons? Consider this:
Whole milk is one of the best foods in the average corner shop-and a vital part of a nutritious diet for . . . children, . . . .
Whole milk is what is called a complete food, because each ingredient plays its part. Without the fat, you can’t digest the protein or absorb the calcium. The body needs saturated fat in particular (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat can’t do the job) to take in the calcium that makes bones strong. Milk fat also contains glycosphingolipids, which are fats that encourage cell metabolism and growth and fight gastrointestinal infections.
Vitamins?
The all-important vitamins A and D are found in the fat. Historically, whole milk and butter were the best sources of these vitamins in the American diet, which had up to 10 times more of both vitamins than modern industrial diets.
In skim and low-fat milk, the vitamins are removed along with the fat, so dairies add synthetic A and D. But Vitamins A and D are fat-soluble; that means they cannot be absorbed into the body unless they’re taken in with fat. Thus, even fortified skim and low-fat milk are not nearly as beneficial as the real thing.
Worried about your heart and arteries?
[S]cientists are increasingly finding that whole milk and saturated fats have been given an undeserved bad rap. Many experts say the evidence blaming saturated fats for heart disease is surprisingly weak. Indeed, the main effect of eating saturated fats is to raise high-density lipoproteins, or H.D.L., the so-called good cholesterol. And with H.D.L., the higher, the better.
Etc., from Nina Planck, author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why
Who she?
[A] food writer, an advocate for traditional foods, an entrepreneur, and the leading American expert on farmers’ markets and local food. A champion of small farmers, she grew up on an ecological vegetable farm in Virginia and sold the family vegetables at farmers’ markets from age nine. After leaving the farm, Nina was a congressional staffer, a reporter for TIME, and a speechwriter for President Clinton’s ambassador to the UK.
A woman of parts, it appears.
I am in close daily contact with someone who has my best interests at heart but can’t abide sardines for reasons connected with the disease “food prejudice.” I am recommending this item to that person:
Dr. Bowden [author of The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth] calls [sardines] “health food in a can.’’ They are high in omega-3’s, contain virtually no mercury and are loaded with calcium. They also contain iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper and manganese as well as a full complement of B vitamins.
He suggests what packed in — olive or sardine oil — and how to eat them — “plain, mixed with salad, on toast, or mashed with dijon mustard and onions as a spread.”
I like them — no, make that love them — plain, thank you.
Here’s to “one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years”:
After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated [UK] government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or “die of ignorance” – the head of the World Health Organisation’s HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.
It’s “a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals.”
Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the “war against Aids” was turned into moral crusade.
Without foundation, and that was known as early as 1987, when there was
“no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals.” In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of “heterosexual Aids” has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.
For that matter, on this blogger’s book shelf is a 1990 book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, which argued, a Washington Monthly reviewer said, that:
the vast majority of Americans are more likely to meet Shirley MacLaine in a different life than to contract the deadly HIV-virus, and that the only reason the news hasn’t gotten out is that a conspiracy of self-interested scientists, opportunitistic politicians, sensationalist journalists, conservative moralizers, and fearful homosexuals have manufactured the scare.
They apparently sought to incite the madness of crowds, as current a problem as when witches were hunted a long time ago. Man-made, preventable global warming, anyone?
Instapundit, quite an afficionado of the long and healthy life, is happy to report more good things about red wine and wine in general:
RED WINE: Is there anything it can’t do? “Recent reports suggest that red wine is a potent force in increasing lifespan, and a new study offers still more good news for wine drinkers. A glass a day, whether white or red, may reduce the risk of developing the nation’s most common liver disorder, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.”
He wisely adds this cautionary note, however:
Note: Drinking a bottle a day will not make you five times better than a glass . . .
Is he sure? Because if there’s any doubt in the matter, I’m feeling experimental.
ALCOHOL REDUCES ARTHRITIS RISK: “People who drink alcohol are less prone to the sometimes crippling disease called rheumatoid arthritis compared with non-drinkers, according to a Scandinavian study published on Wednesday.
People who had a moderate alcohol consumption were 40 and 45 percent less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis compared with people who did not drink or drank only occasionally, it found. Among those who had a high consumption, the risk was reduced by 50 and 55 percent respectively.”
Thanks to Instapundit, a law professor with an eye for the good life.
Prosit!
23 days to cast-off. Just did the stairs again, dressed for outdoors. But a smidgen of iciness left after shovelling, and my wiser head prevailed. Later.
The casts are “weight-bearing.” That is, balance has been the entire issue since Day Two post-op, when still in hospital I got out of bed and walked a few steps to a chair in my room. Back home that night, it was me and my walker, but only for a few days, maybe a week, after which I mostly flew right on my own, with hand out for wall or something else.
#1 Daughter got me a high chair with black leather cushion top, on which I could get on and off with a little bit of shove and balancing. Found it in an artist supplies store. For sitting on at one’s easel, I suppose. That was Xmas Day, a week ago. She adorned it with a red ribbon that is still there.
Was back here 12/14, and in a few days was getting out of bed on my own and heading for the kitchen, where I got my bkfst of coffee, toast, etc. A major hurdle had nothing to do with balance and locomotion but rather of internal motion, as of bowels. The visiting nurse suggested strong drink and a suppository. The latter is a defecation grenade which you put in the right aperture — not in your mouth, stupid! — and wait ten or 15 minutes.
This was my seventh day of non-defecation, and when the results came on schedule, I became one happy camper indeed. Thenceforward, no problem, I am happy to say, and that’s all you are going to hear about that, except here to congratulate #2 Son, who went to Dressel’s Ace on Chi Ave. for a pair of handles to go next to the toilet on the window frame and returned with a beautiful 3–foot or so bar, thanks to advice he got there. Next thing I knew, I was lowering and raising myself by right hand firmly clenching said bar and pulling.
Oh. One more thing. With casts up to thigh, how to fit on t-seat? Simple, we discovered. Raise seat, do without, holding urine-catcher at the right place so as to aim to please — as in the old men’s room admonition, “We aim to please. You aim too, please.”
Now, a thought for the ages. I regret none of this, fall and all, I told #2 Daughter on the phone to Pa. It would be the height of bad manners to do so, I figure. G.K. Chesterton saw no sense in divorce, being so grateful to be married once. He was full of gratitude for the gift of life, which is nothing we earned. Ditto Sir Walter Scott, who invoked “Sat est vixisse” in his Journal.
“Square the odds, and good-night Sir Walter about sixty,” he wrote with regard to an illness of which his brother died at 50, his father at 70 and from which he suspected he also suffered.
“I care not, if I leave my name unstained, and my family properly settled. Sat est vixisse,” meaning, “It is enough to have lived.”
So let us live.
24 days to cast-off. Both will be removed on 1/24. I expect circulation to improve in feet and ankles, which have become a mite tender with ankle-to-thigh protection. For my recently re-attached knee tendons, that is.
The staples were pulled last week, on 15th day of the 12/12 surgery. That was nice. Now it’s only the wrapping and taping under the casts, in each of which he sawed a roughly four by six inch opening, a window to the wound, replacing it after his look-see and staple-removal. Neatly done, in my hospital-style bed in our living room with a not-bad view from 2nd floor of Oak Park Avenue’s tree tops.
My occurrence at the Green Line OP Ave. station (not at Owl Creek Bridge, as in the Ambrose Bierce story) happened in mid-afternoon 12/11, when I missed a step and the cement landing came up to meet my knees suddenly and harshly.
More later on all that. I’m getting tired of standing at the PC. (Can’t bend knees, you know.) As for the injury itself, for scholarly articles go here and report back to this blog. Or don’t bother. I am sure to tell you more than you want to know about it before this account ends.
Blithe Spirit 