Author: Petros

Global food crisis

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I commend Christopher Booker for suggesting there may be a global food crisis coming because of insufficient sunspots. My friend Michael said that his Mulberry bush was several weeks late in bearing ripe berries. Also, I won’t need to replace the air conditioner that we removed last summer. It is June 16, and there is no hot weather yet here in Ontario. Here is the money quote from Booker’s article:

It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world’s food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU’s biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn’t persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn’t vote for last week.

I would go further. The insistence on the use of biofuels is utter folly and presumption. God is the one who provides the abundant harvest; rather than give back to him the tithe owing to him, we have instead burnt it frivolously in our vehicles even though He has provided us abundant sources of high-efficiency energy: nuclear, coal, shale, tar sands, petroleum, and natural gas. We should have stored the food for leaner times instead of using them in our cars. I can easily foresee serious problems because of the lack of wisdom that our political leadership has shown. Famine, pestilence, and war may result from starving populations. Where is Joseph when you need him?

Sickcare not healthcare

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I went into renew my “healthcare” card with our socialized card here in Ontario called “OHIP”.  Healthcare is the wrong name.  It should be called “sickcare” because unless you have specific illnesses which are treatable in the system, you get nothing from it.  Since living in Ontario, I have paid out of pocket or through private insurance for the following:

Dental care:  Teeth are not a part of “healthcare”, so OHIP does not cover any dental care.

Travel Clinic:  If you go overseas and get sick from malaria, hepatitis or yellow fever, you can come home to Ontario and be treated for free, that is if you don’t die first.  But if you want to have vaccinations, other kinds of preventative care, or even a travel consultation with a knowledgeable physician, you have to pay for it yourself.  Since I travel overseas frequently, I’ve paid hundreds of dollars in preventative travel care out of pocket.

Optometrist:  A few years ago Liberal Dalton McGuinty took over Ontario, and the province added a levy to everyone’s payroll taxes and eliminated services including a biannual optometrist check-up.  Less for more.

Chiropractic:  Dr. Aubrey Green of Proformance Health & Wellness Inc. has “cured” me of a painful rotator cuff injury.  None of his treatments were covered by OHIP.  I probably could have gone to a GP (did I mention I don’t have a family doctor, and it is difficult to obtain one in Ontario?), but what would he or she have done except prescribe a painkiller?  Dr. Green used drug-free treatments of acupuncture (with an electric pulse), hands on soft-tissue massage, and a regime of rotator-cuff exercises.  After four weeks I feel very little discomfort and I am back on the basketball court shooting jumpers as Dr. Green promised.

Prescriptions:  All my prescriptions are covered by private insurance.

What has been covered by OHIP?  Last year playing basketball, a teammate elbowed me and I need stitches.  OHIP covered the emergency room costs.  I’ve seen my former family physician for scalp acne twice during the last six years and received an antibiotic prescription.  Because I’ve enjoyed basic good health I’ve had about four medical visits which were covered by OHIP in the last 15 years since living in Ontario.  Meanwhile I’ve made many visits to the travel clinic, the dentist, the chiropractor and the optometrist, and all of this is paid for through private means.  Healthcare is the wrong name. It should be called “sickcare” because unless you have specific illnesses which are treatable in the system, you get nothing.

The Coming Ice Age, by Prof. David Deming

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The following article is from the American Thinker.
David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth’s climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

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Iatrogenesis and Public Health Care

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Iatrogenesis is a term that hardly ever enters the public debate on health care.  Any public discussion of the socialization of health care that pays no heed to iatrogenesis is inadequate.  Awareness of iatrogenesis also would call into question the mantle of divinity that we bestow upon physicians, believing that we cannot exist without them.  Yet physicians are contributing to a serious demographic problem of negative population growth.

The word iatrogenesis comes from Greek word, “iatros” (“physician”); and “genesis” (“origin”) and refers to health problems and death caused by medical science. I was first introduced to the word “iatrogenic” by Neil Postman’s Technopoly, ch. 6; Ivan Illich has written a primer on the subject, Medical Nemesis, which is now dated but still largely valid. The first line of his book is: “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”

Iatrogenesis is considered by many to be the third leading cause of death in US (conservative estimates of the US death toll due to iatrogenesis to be 225,000 per annum). But I would argue that abortion is also iatrogenenic and is nearly always intentionally fatal to the unborn baby. The death toll in this case is 1.2 or 1.3 million more deaths per year. So now we are at 1.5 million per annum or so people killed in the US by medical science. But then this may only be the tip of the iceberg, since it is not in the best interests of medical practitioners to publicize the number of people they have killed. For example, AIDS may be iatrogenic, if Edward Hooper’s theory (see his book The River) that an experimental polio vaccine used in Belgian Congo in the late 1950 may be the cause of the transfer of the Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) from chimpanzees to humans, creating HIV.  The push for assisted suicide and euthanasia will make the circle of iatrogenic death complete, from the young to the old and sick.

A discussion of public health care and socialized medicine that doesn’t take into account iatrogenesis makes an idol out of health care.  Such issues must be approached with sober judgment and care.  I am not saying that physicians can’t help the sick and the injured.  I am saying it really bothers me that we are not publicly aware of iatrogenesis, the leading cause of death.

Here are some examples of iatrogenesis:

Here is another website indicating sources from medical journals and claiming the death rate via iatrogensis is more like 1 million per annum: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm

Cosmetic surgery:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/PainManagement/story?id=4520099
Malaria prophylaxis Lariam: http://www.yourlawyer.com/articles/read/8650
Heath Ledger:
cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/heath-ledgers-death-is-ruled-an-accident/

Michael Jackson

During an abortion (mother):
newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2007/10/23/media-ignore-another-woman-dying-inside-abortion-clinic
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/867/26/
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/240/26/

I voted for a convicted felon

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Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was convicted last year during the election campaign of corruption charges in a federal court in Washington D. C.  I voted in the federal election, and I had to choose between the Republican Stevens and the Democrat Mark Begich, former mayor of Anchorage, whose father was the esteemed Congressman Nick Begich who disappeared in a 1972 plane crash while serving Alaska.  I didn’t know how to vote.  I felt that Stevens, an octogenarian should have ceded his place to a younger Republican because of the corruption charges; Alaska Republicans could have found a suitable candidate.  But he did not.  Nevertheless, I could not in good conscience vote for a Democrat.  So I held my nose and voted for a convicted felon for the first time in my life, realizing that, if Stevens won and his appeals were unsuccessful, Governor Sarah Palin would appoint a Republican interim senator until a new election could be held.
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