Category: Health and Life
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“If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.”
– Kahlil Gibran
More to come . . . .
I produce podcasts on Climate change and Politics. This is the latest one.
Tipping Points
The four degrees C experiment is on. We might reach a four degree rise in temps by 2070, or even earlier. That was unheard of and thought to be impossible — until recently. Anything over 4 degrees will probably lead to tipping points and runaway climate change.
The finding was announced at a conference that took place from September 28th through the 30th, called 4 Degrees and Beyond. (Website here). This episode covers the Oxford conference on this scenario, with the best scientists of the UK discussing our chances of adaptation and survival.
The conference is the first to consider the global consequences of climate change beyond 2°C. Usually it’s not something scientists dare to discuss. The scientists you will hear in this episode are Prof John Schellnhuber (see his slides here), Dr Richard Betts (slides here), and Dr. Myles Allen (see slides here). Allen talked about a new approach to seeing the CO2 problem, as a cumulative effect, with no hard numbers and dates as deadlines. The slides contain maps, graphs, and lots of supporting material for their talk, and the highlights of their talk. This conference was attended by over 130 scientists and climate specialists, and featured over 35 speakers, so there is a lot from the conference website you can listen to and read.
Other news covered included information on what to expect with a 2-6C degree temperature rise from Mark Lynas. A controversial e-mail message buried by the Bush administration because of its conclusions on global warming surfaced Tuesday, nearly two years after it was first sent to the White House and never opened. You can download the original letter here. Senator Boxer said the Obama team might make a “climate pledge” in Copenhagen. Norway pledged 40% emissions cuts. The Kashmir glaciers in India are shrinking at an ‘alarming’ speed. And “CLIMATE CHANGE: Four Degrees of Devastation” is here.
Download this episode here or subscribe on the right.
Music: Afrocelt Soundsystem, and the Tck Tck song, Beds are Burning, and video can be downloaded here.
“In Green Bay, Wisconsin the President held a town hall to talk directly to the American people about the need for real health reform — no excuses, no endless delay. June 11, 2009.”
Maybe so, but when are we going to get single-payer health care? Health care should not be a for-profit system. The only way the HMOs make money is by denying legitimate claims. How many people die each year because we do not have universal, single-payer health care? I’m in the process of suing United Health Care for denying a claim of several years ago because they approved a surgery and then denied that they had approved it. It’s my word against theirs. In a single payer health care system, this would never have happened, and I would not be $8,000 broker than I was when they decided to lie about what they had approved.
His rhetoric about health care sounds lovely, but President Obama needs to understand that people can’t afford dishonest, greedy health care companies, and that appears to be the only kind we have. They are forced into dishonesty in order to make a living and run their business. The problem is that health care should not be a business. We need a completely different, better system. Single payer health care for all.
Senator Bernie Sanders has it exactly right. America needs single-payer health care as soon as possible. Now, I watched the TV show on Friday night called “Farrah’s Story” — about Farrah Fawcett and her fight against cancer. She shot some of the footage herself, and friends shot much of it, so it really looked like amateur video. It was interrupted by people talking about her, hammering home the point of how “brave” she was, almost as though she was the bravest person in the world, though thousands of Americans get cancer every year. It was touching, it was narcissistic, it was sad, and predictably depressing. It was very self-involved, and as a cancer battle, it wasn’t that gripping. I didn’t think it was made well, and the points she seemed to make at the end of it about her own cancer battle were like she almost had her finger on the most important points. She said she made the video to inspire others to keep fighting — yet her battle will not have a happy ending, and she wasn’t particularly inspiring. She was upset that there isn’t more money put into some types of cancer research. The unspoken line was “her type of cancer research”. It sounded a little self-absorbed (though who could blame her). I wanted her to make the point that the average cancer victim does not have her resources, either in the vast support system she had or in the vast sums of money she was able to conjure up to both fight the battle medically and to fund her many trips to Germany for treatment not available in the U.S. Most people with her cancer would have been dead long before now.
- Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
She didn’t quite make that point. It seemed as though she wanted to and just couldn’t figure it out. Well, after seeing the show, it seems that she might have wanted to make that point very much and was not allowed to. First, consider NBC. Much of their advertising is big pharma and HMOs and insurance, etc. But the biggest hurdle she had to get past was how to keep the integrity of her movie the way she wanted it while getting sicker and sicker. She lost out big to that problem, according to the LA Times. And that is the main reason the movie didn’t have her pleading with Congress to pass some big type of health care reform, as Bernie Sanders up there is talking about.
Here is the article that explains what happened to “Farrah’s Story” — which turned into something other than the story she wanted to tell.
Farrah Fawcett’s TV special doesn’t really tell her story, producer says
The executive producer who’s suing to regain creative control of the NBC special “Farrah’s Story” says he’s putting up a fight because “it’s not the show Farrah Fawcett wanted.”
In an exclusive, in-depth interview with Gold Derby, Craig Nevius says Farrah Fawcett wanted the program to be presented in a diary format — not in the traditional documentary mode with talking heads, as was used — emphasizing urgent medical and legal issues that got downplayed in the final telecast.