sfarber

Apparently, this is not advice to Americans visiting the Third World, as advice to marathon runners to limit fluid intake to avoid possible hyponatremia (abnormally low blod sodium)… advice announced seeing as next Monday is the Boston Marathon. Interesting to me, for a variety of reasons. For one, I handled a legal case involving a patient who, unfortunately, during a gynecological procedure, was infused liters and liters of fluid, and died from… hyponatremia. A most unpleasant condition– it leads directly to brain damage, and quite possibly, death. For another, I’ve finished seven marathons (with an eighth one scheduled for this...

President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were paid the ultimate scientific homage by a group of retired Cornell University entomologists: they get to have slime-mold beetle species named after them. (Hat tip to Mrs. TD.) Two of the three named species, Agathidium cheneyi Miller and Wheeler and Agathidium rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler, are found predominantly in Mexico, while the third, Agathidium bushi Miller and Wheeler, is, appropriately enough, found in such Red States as Ohio and North Carolina. The beetles feed on slime mold (some kind of fungi type… stuff), and...

And now to the final part of our brief survey of The Communist Manifesto, Parts III and IV, entitled Socialist and Communist Literature and Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties, respectively. As usual, Marx and Engels prove absurdly accurate in their diagnosis, and even in their prognostication (note how chilling the section on German Socialism is) and as usual, can’t seem to come to a decent plan of action as to how to make any of it actually work out in anything other than a hash, rejecting one scheme which actually seems somewhat viable–...

Experts from China, according to this week’s visit to our friends at Beijing’s People’s Daily, assert that even if China takes strong steps to adjust its currency (the yuan… or the RMB… or the renminbi… which I believe are all the same thing…) against the yankee dollar, the structure of the American economy (household debt off the chart, national savings non-existent, the federal government borrowing because actually taxing those with ability to pay taxes would be taxing the people’s money) will still cause us to run massive trade and current account deficits with China… so instead, we’ll just borrow the...

And so, we’ll continue my deconstructive/reconstructive view of the surprisingly accurate diagnostically and (not surprisingly) absurdly inaccurate prognostically Communist Manifesto, by our long dead buddies Fred and Karl. We’ll move onto the Second part entitled “Proletarians and Communists”. Here, we get into more specific discussions of Marx’s/Engels’ grand plans with some specificity: not the abolition of all property, but the abolition of bourgeois property. The problem, of course, is what (the f***) in practice this actually meant. History only proved that one of the Marx/Engels’ prognosis proved deadly accurate: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by...

I had promised not long ago to analyze the Communist Manifesto against my proposition that Karl and Fred were, in fact, brilliant diagnosticians using tools like magnetic resonance imagers and microbiology, and then, after diagnosing the iillnesses of capitalism with brilliant precision, proceed to prescribe leeches and cupping, thereby accomplishing… well, you know the rest. Section I is entitled “Bourgeois and Proletarians.” One of the suppositions of Marxian theory is that capitalism always sows the seeds of its own destruction, as the necessity for the bourgeoisie to grab ever more power and fruits of production at the expense of a...

Legislators in Florida are hell-bent on passing legislation that would radically reduce possible criminal liability for those who decide to invoke violent deadly force merely because they feel threatened. The prior rule would allow a presumption of deadly force in the home (damned Jehovah’s Witnesses!… oh wait… IN the home…) This will expand that to everywhere. If you cause some gun totin’ maniac to “feel threatened”, he (it will always be a he) may blow your ass away, without fear of prosecution. Home is evidently where your Glock is. As if there weren’t enough reasons never to set foot in...

Vice-President Dick Cheney told the editorial board of The New York Post (you didn’t think he’d be talking to the Nation did you?) that he disagreed with Congressional Great Leader Tom DeLay’s suggestions of “retribution” against the federal judges who refused to order reimposition of a feeding tube or other life-extending or saving measures for Terri Schiavo. (Perhaps, in my best “Hillary Clinton”, there are bridges to be built: even those of us who may have disagreed with the underlying decision to end Ms. Schiavo’s life by a fortnight’s dehydration and starvation still appreciate the agonizing work of the federal...

Our comrades from Beijing’s People’s Daily give us this account of the “Millenium Assessment” report from the UN contending that around 60% of the world’s eco-system is in grave danger of permanent degradation as a result of human activity; China evidently pledges to build a more sustainable society. On cue, Chinese President Hu Jin-tao, on the occasion of the equivalent of Chinese Arbor Day, told the Chinese people that it was their duty to live in harmony with nature as he participated in a tree planting in Beijing. I have heard it suggested that it is most unlikely there would...

His Holiness the Pope John Paul II has passed away at 84. I’m sure many more eloquent than I will comment appropriately. Let’s just say that John Paul II, longest serving pope of the 20th century and third longest of all time, was a towering figure, a man whose moral and rhetorical stature was just about as large as the post he held.