Doctor and activist
29/04/2020
15 November 2019 The battle continues. Here is an article telling how some academics run a little sideline in testifying that smokers understood the risks of tobacco as they smoked themselves to death. Needless to say the academics do not say much about their work. Years ago, Dr Ann Woolcock, founder of the Woolcock Institute […]
28/04/2020
I visited Lesbos, a Greek Island recently as a tourist. I stayed in a villa, did some snorkeling, strolled and ate and drank at restaurants on the beach. The villa owner was from a fishing family and told me about the refugees on the island. There had been a big influx in 2015, both from […]
28/04/2020
Since the last two world wars were over markets, it was assumed at the conference at Bretton Woods that if there were free markets everywhere there would be no wars and countries who did well would prosper. It worked. Germany and Japan traded in markets that had been denied to them pre-war and ‘won the […]
26/04/2020
Dr Ben Ewald from the Hunter, who has been working with Doctors for the Environment has been lobbying for a Federal EPA and wrote a submission on the load-based licensing system, which is another name for polluters paying a levy per tonne of pollutant that they produce. There is some charge for each type of […]
26/04/2020
A Recession Alert! A Law is Coming to Get Ready for Negative Interest Rates, but it being sold as just another move against the ‘black economy. The bill is the ‘Currency (Restriction Use of Cash) Bill 2019’. Cash is used in the black economy to avoid tax. But when the GST came in, the obvious […]
26/04/2020
CT Scans increase the risk of cancer by 24% for one scan and 15% for each subsequent scan. This is based on a 2013 Melbourne study published in the British Medical Journal, which looked at people who had had CT scans at least a year before they developed any type of cancer. The method used […]
26/04/2020
Capitalism is so entrenched as the major aspect of social organisation that when anyone in the Greens questions it, this is assumed to be electoral doom. But there are intelligently argued essays about its limits and its problems. I recently discovered Wolfgang Streek asking, ‘How Will Capitalism End’ in a heavy but still readable essay […]
26/04/2020
Tonight’s 4 Corners is about the Royal Australian Air Force contaminating the groundwater around its bases with a fire fighting foam containing PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoro Alkyl Substances, aka Perfluorinated chemicals, PFCs). It made me think of my experience with pollution. I started off in treatment medicine, and saw all the harm tobacco did, so […]
26/04/2020
As I have posted before South American politics is about grass roots Leftist groups getting the people a better deal alternating with neo-liberal ones where mainly US interests extract the money, usually by supporting a right-wing dictator. The CIA supported coups in Argentina and Chile in the 1990s with huge loss of life and gross […]
26/04/2020
All governments are very concerned about the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well they should be. The medical costs will be huge but as is being belatedly acknowledged the whole of society is to shut down. Most industries will stop. Few will work; nothing will be produced and there will be much less […]