Vaclav Havel

There is always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side.

Makes me feel better already. I used to read Havel a lot, but this line had fallen from my RAM. Sadly, not applicable to rugby.

Your rights are guaranteed, but not your teeth

Rotten, with no quick fixes: the state of our mouths reflects the plight of NHS dentistry | George Monbiot | The Guardian

Every child in the UK is entitled to free treatment by a nonexistent dentist. Some people on benefits, pregnant women and those who have recently given birth also have free and full access to an imaginary service. Your rights are guaranteed, up to the point at which you seek to exercise them.

It’s just business

The painfully high price of Humira is patently wrong | Financial Times

But nearly half of new drugs launched in the US in 2020-21 were priced at more than $150,000 a year, so others have followed its lead. An entire industry has moved towards making products that are breathtakingly expensive.

Please, please, start thinking about reining in IPR.

The Need for an Organised Ambulance Service in 1904.

I came across this article by chance while trying to track down same old papers on skin cancer. It was published in the Lancet in 1904. A few days ago I heard a story about a colleague’s problem in trying to order an ambulance for somebody having a MI.

It is remarkable how institutions can fail, and competence be something that now only exists in the past. This is not a difficult issue to solve. We no longer have a functioning health service. We have stepped back in time. But, hey, it only affects other people.

At an inquest held at Lambeth on nov. 21st Mr.Troutbeck inquired into the death of a girl, named Alice Wood,aged 17 years, of Camborne-road, Southfields, who died in a laundry van as she was being removed to st. Thomas’s hospital to undergo an operation for perforated gastric ulcer.

On Nov. 16th she complained of severe pain in the chest and about midnight Dr. E. A. Miller of Upper Richmond-road was called. He found the girl collapsed and, having diagnosed the condition, decided that an operation was her only chance. No cab could be obtained but at about 2A.M.on Nov.17th a laundry van was procured and in this she was driven to the hospital where on arrival she was found to be dead. Dr. L. Freyberger, who made the post-mortem examination, said that death was due to heart failure following acute peritonitis caused by the rupture of an internal ulcer and that it was accelerated by the jolting of the van. The coroner’s officer said that a horsed ambulance was kept at the Wandsworth Infirmary but that a relieving officer’s order was necessary for its use. The jury returned a verdict of “Death from natural causes,” and added a rider expressing the opinion that there was urgent need for an improvement in the system of providing horsed ambulances for the various metropolitan districts. With this we quite agree and we earnestly hope that the London County Council, which recently received a deputation from the Metropolitan Street Ambulance Association, will see its way to make proper provision.

Blat: the British way.

Blat, the Soviet art of getting by, comes to Britain | The Economist

But it is also corrosive. Blat compounded the inefficiencies of the Soviet system and rendered its boasts ridiculous. It does the same in Britain. Nine in ten dentists have no space for new nhs patients, yet the nhs website boldly declares that it will “provide any clinically necessary treatment needed to keep your mouth, teeth and gums healthy and free of pain”. This is fiction fit for a May Day banner. Blat is a declaration of distrust in a system that only sometimes does what it promises. To queue is to be taken for a fool. Better to shed that English reserve, and push to the front.

We all have trapdoors in our life

Metamorphosis — a magical memoir of a life in pieces | Financial Times

We all have trapdoors in our lives,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on the opening page of his memoir, Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces. His own trapdoor opened on a visit to a neurologist’s office in 2017. Sometimes, as he points out, we escape: the car swerves, we turn away from an argument. The terrible moment eventually comes for us all, though, and we are “on the trapdoor when the lever is pulled”.

From a review.

Not all can be learned

The fertile hatred had dried up in Grosz’s headlong attempt transform himself into an American and get into the spirit of the place. ‘Nobody really needs art anymore, since everybody is practising it,’he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I really love the American optimistic believe that everything can be learned; but I don’t quite believe it.’

Thomas Meaney on the artist, George Grosz, in the London Review of Books, 16th of February 2023

Rugby

France lost to Ireland yesterday. A great game: the world number 1 & 2 teams if you believe the rankings (I don’t). Some of us have always admired French rugby from afar.

Fabien Galthié on the defeat:

He was characteristically philosophical about it all. “We came here to win. It’s a defeat. It’s true that it’s been two years since we lost a game, we were on a series of 14 victories, and the series is over,” he said. “So we must also learn to live with defeat. We don’t like her in this team, she is not a friend, but we will have to spend the evening with her.”

Ireland are formidable, too.

Vampire squids

The Economist

Rolling Stone described Goldman[Sachs]as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

We should forgive a cliché when it becomes true.

Cymru

BBC Radio Wales – Acid Dream: The Great LSD Plot

Wales: the legendary land of druids, dragons and the epicentre of the global hallucinogenic drugs trade. It’s estimated that in the 1970s around 60 per cent of the world’s LSD came from the principality.

This podcast (also available on BBC Sounds) tells the story of the rise and fall of the so-called Microdot gang behind that acid explosion.

Hmm. Wasn’t me.