Medical Health

The headlines today are “Mitt Romney quits after pouring $35 million of his own money into failed campaign.” Of course, we all know that Mitt Romney was running in the Republican primary, the race in which Republican voters choose which Republican leader will run against the Democrats for the U.S. presidency. But I do not hear anyone in the press pointing out that Romney’s $35 million would have been better spent helping the poor right here in the United States.

Romney’s courage (and extra money) would best serve the hopeless (the lost, and especially the lost at sea . . .).

I sent this to CTV News:

Comment re. your 27 April 2007 piece about cancer rates

During the 20th and 21st centuries, we spent a lot of money on war — World Wars I and II, to name just the big ones. If we had spent all that time, energy, money, and life on life-extension, we would have discovered the key to immortality by now.

Maybe someday our enemies will see the light.

Universities should act quickly and institute compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. We can show a substantial number of people that goodwill provides positive benefits.

I hate to say this, but when you provoke people, it is then pretty easy to run around saying that they might be a danger to you or someone else.

In Vancouver during 1982, Professor Wolf Wolfensburger, Syracuse University, New York, argued that thousands of mentally handicapped people die in North American prisons and psychiatric institutions from massive doses of mind-altering drugs, or when emergency or intensive-care treatments are withheld, or due to society’s mistreatment of them: Hard proof is often unavailable: “If Germany had won the war,” he said, comparing the present to the past, “we’d never have seen the evidence.”

Yes, and with Wolfensburger’s statement in mind, many of us would like to see the health-science industry allocate a tiny bit of its wealth to the creation and maintenance of a not-for-profit depository for patients’ narratives, perhaps something similar to the Kenneth Donaldson Archives for the Autobiographies of Psychiatric Survivors (see http://www.successfulschizophrenia.org/kdarch.html).

I have not investigated the Donaldson depository. Al Siebert, a co-founder of the archive, writes, “One day there will be archives of psychiatric abuses similar to the archives that now document Holocaust atrocities. This Archives exists to provide psychiatric survivors with a place to preserve for future generations the unpublished autobiographies of their experiences. The Archives was founded in 1980 when Ken Donaldson, author of Insanity Inside Out and Al Siebert, author of Peaking Out: How My Mind Broke Free from the Delusions in Psychiatry, discovered that many psychiatric survivors have written manuscripts about their experiences but are rarely successful in getting their books published.”

We cannot assert that all ecologists and environmentalists are arrogant, but I have encountered quite a few who would have made stronger contributions had they attended compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. In fact, I believe that many of our professional conservationists have retarded our fight against global warming. If we had replaced them long ago, we would have made more headway in our attempts to introduce preemptive environmental measures.

For example, once when I was discussing the fact that as part of one of my research projects, a rather large group of Seventh Day Adventist fishermen contributed logbooks detailing their catches of salmon, a prominent Ecology professor told me, “Those guys are perverts, the type who climb telephone poles and peep through windows at trailer parks.”

I guess that Ecology professor thought of himself as a fighter. But all he was doing was shooting himself in the foot.

Yes, I believe that man-made global warming is a fact, but I also know that the discovery of the rise in greenhouse gases was not a major scientific breakthrough, and monitoring the greenhouse effect has not required a vast amount of scientific smarts.

And I wonder, If global warming brings about a major worldwide catastrophe, will that catastrophe prevent an even worse (and so-far unseen) man-made disaster, one that perhaps looms further out in the future. After all, it is science that brings us to these deadly turning points, and our science is the product of human nature. In fact our top scientists and academics arrive at the top though brute ambition, and in the course of their ambition, often abuse their families and students. Their public sense of ethics and moral imperative and honor is not a constant: it is something they often abandon in private, both at home and at school. Ask their sons and ex-wives. Ask the wounded and disabled they all left behind.

The government and the media keeps telling us to prolong our lives: quit smoking, exercise, eat right, get a cat and a dog, get married, quit renting, quit driving fast (fly, don’t drive), have two drinks a day, don’t drink, take a multivitamin, don’t take a multivitamin, drink green tea, drink coffee (they say it prevents liver cancer), get a flu shot, walk, run, take a nap, take a bus, work hard, save, save, save, invest, invest, invest, you get what you deserve . . .

One of my doctors said, “It seems they are saying we are supposed to live forever.”

Yeah, feel guilty for not trying to live forever. That way you won’t mope around about the fact that the rich keep working you harder, that your job keeps stressing you out . . . Maybe you’ll forget that stress kills.

That’s how the rich get richer — the government, the media, the tycoons. They hand you infectious fantasies and psychotic beliefs. They keep you real busy working at getting real old.

(I say get rid of the cigars. Avoid stress, exercise, eat right.)

The media keeps saying that today’s kids are obese and that today’s parents may be the first generation in history to outlive their children. Yet, in the United States and Canada, smoking and lung cancer are on the decline, which makes me wonder whether cigarettes would keep our teenagers and twenty-somethings slim, allowing them to outlive their parents (rather than the other way around), even though they eventually die of smoking-related illnesses.

I’m being sarcastic, of course. You really do not want to take up smoking in order to fit into one or more 2008 prom dresses. At www.talkpromdresses.com you can join in on the discussions and window shop for almost any type of wedding dress, from formal to gothic.

Here is the statement I gave to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and then e-mailed to President Bush:

One of my present concerns is that science (both in government and academia) attracts (and subsequently recruits) sinister political hacks and abject academic lackeys. I recently expressed my concern to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy:

[originally addressed to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy]

In your U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy Preliminary Report you state,

“The education of the 21st century ocean-related workforce will require not only a strong understanding of oceanography and other disciplines, but an ability to integrate science concepts, engineering methods, and sociopolitical considerations. Resolving complex ocean issues related to economic stability, environmental health, and national security will require a workforce with diverse skills and backgrounds. Developing and maintaining such a workforce will rely, in turn, on programs of higher education that prepare future ocean professionals at a variety of levels and in a variety of marine-related fields.”

Obviously, your educational and institutional environments and curricula must include rigorous methods for assessing codes of conduct and ethics. Mistreatment of employees, students, and constituents WILL RENDER YOUR SCIENCE SUSPECT.

So your grandparents passed down one or two genetic vulnerabilities and you have become ill with a genetic disease (maybe arthritis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, or breast cancer). And you know that you did not bring on your condition, you know that it is not your fault, and your doctors and friends know that much, too. Yet all the neurotic busybodies are saying, “It serves you right.”

Well, think of the bright side: the mean-spirited gossips (particularly those living in rainy climates) have once again shown off their ignorance. They live in the dark, like rodents. Because what they have really said is that you are the blame for your grandparents’ genes, that you got what you deserved the day you were born.

What a bunch of arrogant, greedy, thoughtless fools.

Back during the 1980s, when I was busy fulfilling the requirements of a Ph.D. degree, I performed quite a bit of dangerous field work. In my line of study, field workers and their associates suffered severe injuries, including decapitation, and died in small-plane crashes. Some of them drowned.

The university gave me a temporary position as a graduate research assistant, and the rest of my funding was drawn from research grants and sholarships. But years later I discovered that neither my graduate research assistantship nor my grants provided disability insurance and/or health insurance (never mind life insurance).

Therefore, I am advising all students to refrain from risking their lives and limbs during their course of studies, and I am saying that you must insist that the university provide you with disability and/or health benefits or allow you to use part of your grant money to buy the necessary insurance.

Universities think of themselves as absolutely benevolent, but when all is said and done, you can not trust them, and you must force them to keep up their end of the deal.