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
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
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
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
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
This perceptive article by Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper (11-17/4/20) details what disaster capitalists are doing to get mining under dams, fracking and revamps for coal-fired power up while Parliaments are closed and the world is distracted by the COVID epidemic. At the head of it all is the inimitable rorter, Angus Taylor, busy […]