The Disastrous Drugs Edition

Here is some blogging I’ve been following. Some are more business ethics than others. We open with a contribution from the ever versatile, “Dear Kitty, Some Blog.” The blog, Kempton Ideas Revolutionary, talks the importance of original sources. We discover that research universities in the quest for money are fueling inequality. “Meet the billionaires” speaks for itself and a truly fascinating take on how immigrants become “white!”

I close with a blogger returning from life crisis to blog again.

Best wishes!

James Pilant

As always Subscribe, Share and Like!!!!

This is from “Dear Kitty, Some Blog.”

Please share this important podcast as we hear from ex-Irish Defence Force members highlight the grave circumstances around the use of Lariam. Lariam is an extremely dangerous drug with damaging and long lasting side effects. This show must be heard and spread across Ireland.

Members of the Irish Defence Forces are not legally or constitutionally protected in this matter. They need the people to raise a voice and stand for them and with them in putting an end to this and protecting our fellow country men and women.

I’m seeing similar problems with American soldiers in a more general way. This is from author, Alan Zarembo, writing for the Los Angeles Times. 

U.S. Army researchers have found that soldiers coming home from war suffer from chronic pain and use prescription opioids at far higher rates than civilians.

In a survey of an infantry brigade that had recently returned from Afghanistan, 44% of soldiers reported having been in pain for at least three months, and 15% had used opioids during the past month.

By comparison, researchers estimate than 26% of civilians live with chronic pain and 4% use opioids.

“We were surprised by the percentages,” said Robin Toblin, a psychologist at the Walter Reed Institute of Research and lead author of the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Experts said the study suggested that, despite the military’s efforts to improve pain management — a growing concern during the course of the recent wars — more needs to be done. It also raised but did not answer questions about whether opioids were being prescribed properly.

Dr. Mark Edlund, a psychiatrist and pain expert at RTI International, a North Carolina nonprofit research group, said the study gave no indication that painkillers are being used any differently in the military than they are in other health systems.

“American medicine in general is overprescribing,” said Edlund, who was not involved in the study.

Kempton Ideas Revolutionary

(He’s quite right – it is always most rewarding to read the originals rather than the current summarizers. Go to the original where possible! jp) 

One time I was looking at a beautiful picture book of fractals, my elderly and wise math professor ask why didn’t I go read the master Benoit Mandelbrot himself instead? Since then, I’ve made it a habit to read masters’ works by the masters themselves, often in their original papers.

Research Universities encouraging inequality

We’ve been learning a great deal about the conditions and consequences of the obscene levels of inequality in the United States—now, in the past, and it seems for the foreseeable future.

Right now, inequality is escalating within public higher education, especially in research universities that are chasing both tuition revenues and rankings. Thus, the editorial board of the Badger Herald, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, found it necessary to criticize the lifting of the out-of-state student enrollment cap because it betrays the Wisconsin Idea and is making the university both “richer and whiter.”

Meet the billionaires pushing charter schools

How Immigrants became white?!

Here it is important to understand how, exactly, Americans ‘become white’. The history of Polish-Americans is an illuminating example. Upon arriving in the U.S. en masse in the late 19th and early 20th century, Poles endured discrimination based on their appearance, religion and culture.In 1903, theNew England Magazine decried the Poles’ “expressionless Slavic faces” and “stunted figures” as well as their inherent “ignorance” and “propensity to violence”. Working for terrible wages, Polish workers were renamed things like “Thomas Jefferson” by their bigoted Anglo-Saxon bosses who refused to utter Polish names.

The Poles, in other words, were not considered white. Far from it: they were considered a mysterious menace that should be expelled. When Polish-American Leon Czolgosz killedPresident William McKinley in 1901, all Poles were deemedpotential violent anarchists. “All people are mourning, and it is caused by a maniac who is of our nationality,” a Polish-American newspaper wrote, pressured to apologize for their own people. The collective blame of Poles for terrorism bears great similarity to how Muslims (both in the U.S. and Europe) are collectively blamed today.

From the Blog – Rainbows and Road Rage – A blogger suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but returns to blog anew

Hi. Its been a while.

I wish I had some extremely life changing event that would explain why I took time off so early in my attempted blogging “career” (cuz I’m making ZERO dollars from this venture). I wish I had some amazing trip that explained my absence from the blogosphere and provided a wealth of writing material for those who haven’t unfollowed me at this point.

I don’t.

Instead, I have this explanation: Life got in the way and is basically being a bitch at this point.