Doctor and activist
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 […]
26/04/2020
Sometimes we have little experiences that are wake up calls. We need to note them, and act on them. I have little to do with Centrelink. Like most North Shore doctors I assume it does its job, and also tacitly assume it has nothing to do with me. It wrote to me about 6 months […]
26/04/2020
We hear of ‘victimless crimes’ like urinating in a park when all the toilets are shut, or jaywalking. Every now and then a politician wants kudos for actually stating that they are not going to prosecute (and they are going to save on legal system time). But more important are ‘crimeless victims’ where the neglect […]
26/04/2020
We see Trump not impeached on Party lines with only Mitt Romney crossing the floor. Sure he may have bent US foreign policy to attack a political rival, but hey, he is on our side and we want to win the election[1]. Meanwhile over in Oz, the Auditor-General finds that the Deputy Leader of the […]
25/04/2020
I met a 54 year old Albanian man who was keen to tell me his story. He is now a builder in England where he works with 3 of his brothers. He was born in a family of 11 boys and they lived with his uncle’s family, so there were 16 boys and no girls […]