earth-song:

Zen feeling” by Sylvain Sester

earth-song:

“Love You Darling” by Judylynn Malloch

Just in time for Mother’s Day :)

rtnt:

The Best Health Care In The World?

Opponents of health care reform often argue that despite its high costs, our system provides the highest quality of care in the world and that any changes would therefore be counterproductive. While reviewing a new study for Reuters, Sharon Begley explains why the favorite statistic of reform opponents, cancer survival, is a flawed metric for judging the quality of our health care system:

If a tumor is diagnosed very early in its existence - if it has a long “lead time” - the patient may survive, say, two years if the tumor is very aggressive. If an identical tumor is found in that patient’s identical twin later, the twin will survive, say, six months. But the twins die at the same age. The first survived longer with cancer due to lead-time bias, but did not have a longer lifetime.

…

Even more problematic, said Berry, is a problem cancer experts have only recently recognized: overdiagnosis. Because cancer screening is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, especially for breast and prostate cancer, “we find many more cancers than are found in Europe,” he said. “These are cancers that tend to be slowly growing and many would never kill anyone.”

Screening therefore turns thousands of healthy people into cancer patients, even though their tumor would never threaten their health or life. Counting these cases, of which there are more in the United States than Europe, artificially inflates survival time, experts said.

Read the full article here.

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Spring is coming! That means asparagus!! 

gastrogirl:

grilled asparagus tartines with ricotta, pesto, and scallions.

Growing these plants in the city will make food production less costly both for the environment and for consumers.

rtnt:

The Problems With Fracking

For The New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben offers a cogent summation of the current debate over natural gas’ safety and viability as a 21st century energy source. 

…how much damage is being done to water wells and underground aquifers from methane migration and the chemicals mixed with water and then injected into fracking wells under high pressure? You might call this the “flaming faucet” question, and it has understandably and rightly galvanized many of the local people fighting fracking. The industry claims that there’s no problem—that the cement casings they put in the wells keep the chemicals out of layers of soil where drinking water might be found. 

…

Preliminary research from Duke University seemed to indicate that indeed methane was showing up in drinking water; in December, the EPA released its first thorough study, conducted in the Wyoming town of Pavilion, where residents had reported brown, undrinkable water after nearby fracking operations. The EPA concluded that the presence in the water of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers and the assortment of “other organic components” were “the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracking fluids with ground water,” and told local residents to stop drinking from their wells.

The company involved insisted that the EPA had introduced the contaminants itself; Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, best known for decrying global warming as a “hoax,” added that the EPA report was part of “President Obama’s war on fossil fuels.” 

Read the full article here.

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Such talent! Joe Hisaishi has been the musical mastermind behind almost all my childhood movies :)

rtnt:

The Humanitarian-Aid Industry
Today’s guest submission is from Liz Cambron.

Do relief organizations do more harm than good? Philip Gourevitch for The New Yorker provides a brief history of modern humanitarian-aid.

Maren, who came to regard humanitarianism as every bit as damaging to its subjects as colonialism, and vastly more dishonest, takes a dimmer view: that we do not really care about those to whom we send aid, that our focus is our own virtue. He quotes these lines of the Somali poet Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Aid organizations and their workers are entirely self-policing, which means that when it comes to the political consequences of their actions they are simply not policed. When a mission ends in catastrophe, they write their own evaluations. And if there are investigations of the crimes that follow on their aid, the humanitarians get airbrushed out of the story.

Read the full article here.

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