One opportunity missed
Talking (as we were) about capitalism expanding to fill every vacuum — and continuing our horticultural theme — it’s astonishing to me that there isn’t a significant US market in homegrown coca leaves and opium poppies.
We certainly learned to grow decent marijuana eventually. America has places that represent every sort of climate on earth, and there’s sure as shit enough money in cocaine and heroin.
I don’t know much about coca, but opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) grow readily enough in lots of places. Near as I can tell from a quick poke around the web, they are legal to grow in the US. They certainly are in the UK. Just not to harvest.
Which is also pretty easy. Shortly after the petals fall off the flowers, you make three very shallow cuts along the seed pod with a razor. A white latex sap, like unto Elmer’s glue, weeps out of the cuts. Leave it overnight, it goes brown and sticky, scrape it into a spoon — and that, ladies and gentlemen, is opium.
Going from raw opium to morphine or heroin requires chemistry and other things that baffle and confuse weasels, but I don’t think it’s rocket science.
I’ve never actually harvested opium, and I’m not just saying that because the British government is intrusive and impertinent. I really haven’t.
But I once harbored ambition to be a sort of Johnny Appleseed — or Stoaty Opiumseed, if you will — sowing somniferum up and down the land. For no good reason beyond sticking a finger in the eye of The Man and the evil bastards who live off the international drug trade.
Problem is, I suck at growing stuff.
April 28, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 31
Loaves, fishes and pap smears
Yeah, dude. We totally, totally believe you can add tens of millions of people to the insurance pool and nobody’s premiums will go up and nobody’s coverage will go down. Totally. Because we are totally the inbred paste-eating retards they told you about at Harvard.
This is an unbelievably clumsy piece of political reasoning, this bill. They forgot the First Rule of Ponzi Schemes: in the beginning, everybody gets a pony. Near as I can figure it, nobody ever gets a pony with this thing.
If you already have insurance (Medicare, Medicaid or private), either your coverage goes down, your premiums go up or both.
If you don’t have insurance, the government is going to force you to stick your hand in your pocket and buy something you could damn well have bought any time, without the helpful assistance Guido the Legbreaker.
The segment of society that is currently uninsured, not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but poor enough to trigger substantial government assistance paying for this shit — the group of voters that is kinda, sorta getting a pony — must be incredibly small.
I wonder if he’s registered to vote.
March 23, 2010 — 10:55 pm
Comments: 38
But wait, there’s more…!
God, this whole healthcare thing makes me feel like I hopped aboard the Crazy Train for Crazy Town. There is no Obama bill, am I right? There’s the bill the House already passed, and there’s the bill the Senate already passed. Any changes to either and it’s a brand new bill that has to go back through the whole process again from scratch, which is right out. So all this crap about incorporating Republican ideas from the dog-and-pony show is just bullshit, am I right?
So why are they reporting the bullshit with a straight face?
No, no…please not to be answering the rhetorical question. I know why. It’s just, every time the fourth estate looks me in the eye and tells me utter flat-out lies, it feels like the first time.
March 8, 2010 — 9:28 pm
Comments: 19
Time for your medication, honey
I’ve been avoiding writing about the NHS. Health care, in all its ghastly detail, is so effing boring. And I’ve never been sick in either country. You never really know a system until you’ve depended on it.
But I’m the only one in my circle who has lived with no insurance, and under Blue Cross and under the NHS, so I feel obliged to weigh in. Even if much of my experience of anyone’s healthcare system is as an interested bystander.
First off, the NHS isn’t that bad. The horror stories you read in the Daily Mail — beloved of the Drudge Report — represent the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals viewed through the jaundiced lens of a sensationalist media. If you took the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals in the US, I’m certain we could match them wrong-kidney for missed-diagnosis. The truth isn’t in the outliers. The NHS is pretty good for most people most of the time. HOWEVER…
The NHS is pretty good, but it’s not quite good enough. The real picture isn’t in individual horror stories, but broader averages. As Theodore Dalrymple says, “Britain’s hospitals have vastly higher rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a measurement of the cleanliness of hospitals) than those of any other European country; and survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world, and lower even than among the worst-off Americans.” (Incidentally, Theodore Dalrymple — AKA Anthony Daniels, MD — is a god. Google him and read all 92,500 hits. Do it now, Mister!).
They aren’t actually proposing an NHS, so comparisons aren’t all that meaningful. Not all government-run health systems are the same; some work better than others. The NHS was a bottom-up restructuring of public health, for better or worse. What Washington hopes to do is impose a bunch of new bureaucracy on an existing public system. It’s less “reform” than a controlled demolition. Like being nibbled to death by ducks.
The current US system is already a de facto universal solution. The old have Medicare, the poor have Medicaid, the rich live like kings amongst us and most of the rest have insurance through work. As armybrat and Bob touch on in the comments to the previous thread, nobody gets turned away for acute care, regardless of their ability to pay (which is one reason the system is so expensive).
So the main problem we have is middle class people who are uninsured (or underinsured) and have an unexpected or pre-existing serious, chronic medical problem. How many people are in that spot? I don’t know, but it sure as HELL isn’t 47 million. And fixing it sure as HELL isn’t worth completely shattering what we have now.
Because the US has the best medical care in the world. We get hammered all the time with how “broken” our system is. It isn’t. We have fabulous medical care — innovative, experimental, enthusiastic and scientific as shit. It’s just that not everyone has sufficient access to it. That’s a much narrower problem than the one Washington wants to “solve”.
Theres a lot more to public health care, of course. The cost of our existing programs, necessary taxes, more intrusion in our private lives, “death panels”, malpractice law, illegals in the system. But I’ve already bored myself stiff. And I’d really rather spend my time Photoshopping Obama’s head where no Obama’s head has gone before.
September 8, 2009 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 15
Who’s this jaunty lad?
It’s the new H1N1 swine flu virus all the kids are talking about! The CDC Influenza Lab took some holiday snapshots.
Actually, now that I squint at it, I’m guessing that’s a bunch of H1N1s and a couple of distressed blood cells. Or is the scale wrong for that? There wasn’t anything descriptive by way of caption.
Does it strike you as odd that they’ve gone quiet about this thing? After grossly overplaying the looming plague, the daily sick-roll gets hardly a mention now. Paranoid Me thinks paranoid thoughts of paranoia. Reasonable Me thinks it’s probably because the thing is spreading like a pandemic, but not exactly killing like a plague. Wide but shallow. Bit of a dud, really.
Anyhow, you can find the CDC’s daily reports — if’n you are so inclined — here. Or you can follow them on Twitter, if you’re a Twit.
But, even better, you can sign up for their email alerts. They’ve got a whole bunch of different individual alerts to sign up for. Even better, on the next page, you can sign on for alerts from other government agencies, like FEMA and the FDA.
Sure, I just volunteered to get a buttload of government bureaucracy-spam. But I did it using my silliest email address!
Good weekend, all…!
May 15, 2009 — 6:43 pm
Comments: 19
feeling faint…haven’t…eaten in…many many…minutes…
Had my first experience of the NHS last week. I brought some blood pressure meds from the States, but I knew I’d have to dive into socialized medicine when that ran low.
I am happy to report that they did not lower my blood pressure by hacking off one of my limbs with a rusty circular saw. Staff was professional and polite; appointment was timely. In fact, my experience so far has been indistinguishable from America-with-corporate-health-insurance (including having to pony up a co-pay on my meds).
For the record, I believe the US had the most sensible public medical scheme in the world…thirty years ago. Do you remember what we did before the invention of the HMO? We paid for the small stuff ourselves, out of pocket, and bought relatively inexpensive catastrophic health insurance for in case we did something extravagant like step in front of a bus. Best cost/services trade off ever devised.
I voluntarily went back to that old system for a while, maybe fifteen years ago. Several big HMO’s in a row went bust on me and I got sick of changing doctors. So I said screw it, opted for the indemnity insurance with a high deductible, picked a doctor at random and paid for the routine stuff myself.
A typical office visit was $60. A tetanus shot was $35. A thorough blood workup: $110. At year’s end, I spent less on my health than on car maintenance. I stopped when I did the math and realized my employer was charging me more to do it this way. Bastards. Stupid, stupid bastards.
The idea behind the Health Maintenance Organization is that patients getting routine medical care should spend less on health care in the long run by catching small problems before they become big problems. But in the short run, such a scheme would obviously cost more. So the state was asked to subsidize HMOs at the start. Can you guess if those projected savings ever materialized?
And is the very HMO concept viable? It seems so logical that regular, routine care is a good idea that I was shocked to read Theodore Dalrymple (in a…book…the name of which I don’t recall…that is in a box somewhere) asserting that it is not. Medicine is not without risk: there are drug conflicts, doctor errors, hospital infections. Many conditions get better on their own. Some diseases are less dangerous than their cure (slow-advancing cancers in the very elderly, for example).
It’s a matter of absolute chance whether you’ll be the poor bastard who comes down with something that needs catching in the nick of time, or whether you’ll catch something that would have been better let alone.
I’m rambling. I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten anything in almost a hundred and thirty two minutes. I went to pains to have my annual blood work done before I left but it turns out, they use different measures here and I have to have it done again. Tomorrow. And it’s a fasting test.
Ummm…vodka isn’t food, right?
March 16, 2009 — 5:35 pm
Comments: 10
Fishing for tarts
Lots and lots of things have been fished out of the Seine. This was one of them. Maybe. If you want the long version, ask Google and spend an afternoon at it. Or go with the short version:
No-one knows who she was, really. She is called l’Inconnue de la Seine. The usual story is that she was drawn from the river in the late 1880s and the morgue attendant was so taken with her beauty and poignant expression that he called for a mask to be made.
I’m going to call bullshit on that bit, anyhow. No way this is the face of a dead woman. In fact, it would be difficult to take a cast of a living woman and catch a smile. Plaster is heavy and the dead seriously lack muscle tone. If this thing started life as the mask of a woman, it was heavily recarved afterwards (which is not at all uncommon with casts).
Anyhow, the story continues, she was put on display (in the 1880s, unclaimed bodies — up to fourteen at a time — were put in a chilled room at the morgue, fronted by plate glass. It was the most popular shop window in Paris). No-one claimed her.
Then somehow the mask escaped into the population. It was a sensation. Factories were contracted to churn out copies (in fact, one story I find plausible is that l’Inconnue was actually an entrepreneurial mask-maker’s daughter, alive and well at the time). No salon or filthy bohemian garret was complete without one. She appeared in poems, novels, baudy limericks (I’m just guessing on that last one). She was an icon of feminine beauty for decades, well into the 20th Century.
And then she really got popular. In 1958, emergency docs Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal chose l’Inconnue for the face of the original Resusci Annie (Snopes says oui to this story). Making her, officially, the most kissed woman of all time.
Thought a little creepy story might not go amiss today, this being Hallowe’en week and everybody being utterly sick to death of poltics and all.
October 29, 2008 — 2:11 pm
Comments: 37
Doctor’s orders
I just gave blood, so I’m not supposed to do anything strenuous. Like think. Or post something interesting.
I always give blood when they phone me up. You give somebody money, you don’t know where the hell it goes. Give them blood? There’s pretty much one thing they can do with it. (Plus, I love giving Uncle B the coffee mugs with the big RIBC drop o’ blood logo on the side).
The difference between the ones that call and ask and the ones that screen you when you get there is shocking. The phone ladies are all, like, “pleaseohpleaseohpleeeeeease give us some blood. You’ll be a hero to adorable big-eyed puppies everywhere!”
And the screener ladies are like, “So, Miz Weasel, are you a dirty, filthy whore? Because you look like a dirty, filthy whore. Yeah, you give sex for money, right? You shoot up? You’ve snuck off to Cameroon again, haven’t you?” I understand the need to keep bad things out of the blood supply, but if I were having sex in exchange for drugs, I’d like to think I’d have the decency to lie about it.
My favorite question is the one about whether you have ever once had sex with a man who has ever once had sex with another man. How the hell would I know? I mean, technically.
A couple of times I’ve been turned away — high blood pressure, stuff like that. They always act like I tried to put one over on them. “So! Tried to sneak some of your filthy whore blood past us, eh?”
Just once, I’d like the phone ladies and the blood ladies to trade places. Sure, the phone ladies would probably poke me full of holes and leave me soaked in my own gore, but I’d feel so good about it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to lie around and eat things. Doctor’s orders.
July 15, 2008 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 31
Electric weasels: never around when you need one
Dianne Odell, about whom I wrote a small post last year, was the longest-surviving resident of an iron lung. At least, she was until recently, when a tree fell across a power line and they couldn’t get the backup generator going.
Memphis. Uh-huh. That explains the Pimp My Iron Lung look.
Brrrrr. Fifty-eight years in an iron lung. Nightmare. Please to be counting of blessings, kthxbai.
May 31, 2008 — 6:40 am
Comments: 19
Ow! What the hell…?
I woke up with a nasty headache this morning. I don’t get many of those; not since I quit smoking, anyhow.
I didn’t have any caffeine yesterday. I usually have a thermos of coffee and a couple of Diet Dr Peppers…but I forgot my thermos, and I’ve been stuck with black cherry soda since they were out of my favorite tipple since my last supermarket run.
Is that it? I’ve never believed in the caffeine-withdrawal headache. I thought I could pick it up and put it down at will. But I have been increasing my dose lately.
If this is the first sign of that nasty flu that’s making the rounds, I’m going to go HOWLING apeshit. In between trips to the bathroom.
February 21, 2008 — 11:19 am
Comments: 24