Recovery from a patient's perspective
Having a catastrophic illness (the term gives me a slight thrill) is an interesting experience if it doesn’t see you off, albeit one you wouldn’t wish for. You learn a lot: about yourself, about your friends, family and colleagues, what matters and doesn’t. But mainly you learn about the grind of illness and recovery. If you’re the sort of person who has only ever had to deal with colds and cuts, food poisoning and the odd virus that sends you to bed for a week of groggy dozing, what strikes you most is the glacial pace of recuperation. You drift through weeks of seemingly changeless days, with only tiny incremental improvements. I had a bad few months with tonsillitis and glandular fever in the 90s, but it was nothing compared with this. A cancer survivor warned me that recovery does not run in a straight line. I now think of it like a stockmarket chart after a crash: the line of health rises from the trough in painfully slow, uneven jags, it plateaus and slips back. Look at the weeks and you despair; only a graph of the year shows a positive picture.
This article came up on my tumblr radar. It turned out to be a great read. It’s about a man who developed a rare brain abscess and his struggle to recover after surgery. Interesting that he uses the stock market analogy. I often tell my patients the same thing. Sometimes recovery is 2 steps forward, one step back (or slower). I encourage a lot of my patients to keep a journal of their symptoms over the course of a few months- whether recovering from surgery or doing physical therapy for the first time. Often recovery is occurring but at too slow a pace to keep up with our modern fast paced expectations.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The 20th Century was a horrible litany of absurd experiments and atrocities committed by intellectuals, or by elite groupings that claimed a higher knowledge. Simple folk usually have enough common sense to avoid the worst errors. Sometimes they need to take very stern action to stop intellectuals leading us to ruin.
The root error of the modern academy is to pretend (and perhaps believe, which is even less forgiveable), that economics is a science and answers to Newtonian laws.
In any case, Newton was wrong. He neglected the fourth dimension of time, as Einstein called it, and that is exactly what the new classical school of economics has done by failing to take into account the intertemporal effects of debt – now 360pc of GDP across the OECD bloc, if properly counted.
There has been a cosy self-delusion that rising debt is largely benign because it is merely money that society owes to itself. This is a bad error of judgement, one that the intuitive man in the street can see through immediately.
Debt draws forward prosperity, which leads to powerful overhang effects that are not properly incorporated into Fed models. That is the key reason why Ben Bernanke’s Fed was caught flat-footed when the crisis hit, and kept misjudging it until the events started to spin out of control.
Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data.
It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like
Insert your representative here….
Kicked out of office? Go straight to Wall Street
Wall Street has dramatically expanded its influence on Capitol Hill over the past year, using a lobbying army that includes nearly 1,500 former federal employees and 73 former members of Congress who have been deployed during debate on financial reform legislation….
Of the 73 lawmakers-turned-lobbyists touting Wall Street’s interests, 17 served on congressional banking committees during their time in office, including former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Michael Oxley (R-Ohio), a co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Moments
Count this post as one of those “distractions.” Take it seriously at your own peril.
Thomas Sowell
Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy – quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody’s rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to go.
