We spend $150 billion per year treating cancer, yet mortality rates from this disease remain largely unchanged from fifty years ago.
According to oncologist Azra Raza, our systems for treating cancer are fundamentally broken. In conversation with LeRoy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology, she discusses her husband’s battle with leukemia and frames the medical and human difficulties of treating cancer.
She will be speaking at Town Hall 11/12 at 7:30 PM.
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Thanks to Gordon G for finding this. Just how many people can our planet support given the variables of climate change, birth control, fertility and consumption. What will be our quality of life with the projections of growth?
Walking is back in the zeitgeist here. Seattle author and New York Times columnist Tim Egan has a new book, A Pilgrimage to Eternity, about hoofing it from Canterbury to Rome in search of faith. There’s The Seattle Walk Report, an Instagram-eye-view of the city by a writer/cartoonist with a gift for spotting marvelous detail of the city’s fabric from its sidewalks. In the new Netflix video series “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” the Microsoft co-founder is interviewed while on walks, and we learn that he thinks — or processes — best while walking or pacing. High on the list of new walking works is David Guterson’s latest book, Turn Around Time: A Walking Poem for the Pacific Northwest, published this fall by The Mountaineers.
Mountaineers Books is not known for publishing poetry. The company’s reputation has been built on hiking guides and mountaineering memoirs. This is a first: an epic poem by a famous writer. Guterson is one of Seattle’s preeminent authors, behind such novels as Snow Falling on Cedars, Ed King, and The Other, books deeply imbued with Northwest locales, history and serious themes.
Turn Around Time has these aspects, but much more. It reads like a cerebral exercise in the outdoors, a poem not simply about hiking, but about the journey of life itself. It is augmented with black and white illustrations by Northwest artist Justin Gibbens.
Thanks to Gordon G for finding this!
People used to think of growing old as part of the natural progression of life from birth to death. Not anymore. Now we go directly from middle age to you’re-just-as-old-as-you-feel. “Old age” has been dropped from our vocabulary. “You’re not old!” people say when I describe myself that way. I’m 74 with an assortment of age-related ailments and a generous complement of sags and wrinkles. If I’m not old, who is?
Today, we’re supposed to age “well.” The term is fraught with expectations that I, for one, can’t meet. If I’d belonged to an earlier generation, I’d have been expected to retire to the proverbial rocking chair on the porch — but my age mates are not going gently into that good night. Older people in the 21st-century expect to be able to ski, play tennis, run marathons, bicycle, swing dance and even sky dive indefinitely. These days, if you slow down with age it’s your own fault. It means you’re not eating right, working out, taking the right supplements, thinking positive enough.
The Boomer generation was going to live fast and die young. We’re still living fast but we’re not dying young — so we live as fast as possible as a way to pretend that we’re not going to die at all. Unfortunately, those of us who are suffering the physical and mental ravages of age are an uncomfortable reminder to our more youthful peers that they, too, will one day grow old.
I am assailed daily with stories of elders who do amazing things at advanced ages — run marathons at 85, teach yoga at 90, bungee jump at 96. These stories are supposed to be inspiring. I find them depressing. I will never do any of those things. The rest of us old folks — those who actually suffer from common ailments of aging such as arthritis, heart disease or emphysema — feel left behind in the mad rush to never get old. I wind up wanting to stay home, because in this age-well-or-you’re-worthless world, struggling to keep up is humiliating.
Many people in their 70s do not have physical limitations. They can do everything they did at 50, and more power to them, but not being one of them makes me and a lot of other seniors feel like pariahs among our peers.
I have a 77-year-old friend with spinal stenosis, a common and painful ailment of older people. She is unstable on her feet and can’t get around without a walker. She is very sociable but refuses to go out because she’s ashamed to be seen with her walker. The ageism that makes her afraid to be seen with a walker winds up further marginalizing older people who are already segregated from the mainstream. It’s no wonder that loneliness is becoming an epidemic among seniors.
Even retirement communities advertise themselves as for the “active senior.” If you’re not active, you’d better find somewhere else to live.
It’s time that the media stop fishing for clicks with their stories of older people engaging in extreme sports and focus on celebrating seniors who find a way to live well despite physical limitations — people like Carmen Herrera, who sold her first painting at 89, or Barbara Beskin, who landed her dream job as an industrial designer in Silicon Valley at 90; or even seniors like Joe Bartley, who got bored with retirement and was thrilled to be hired as a waiter at a local diner at age 89.
It’s also about time we seniors stop judging each another by how “youthful” we act or look.
I’m taking a page from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that one day elders will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the tautness of their muscles but by the content of their character.”
Comment: Juul is an American electronic cigarette company which spun off from Pax Labs in 2017. It makes the Juul e-cigarette, which packages nicotine salts from leaf tobacco into one-time use cartridges.
Juul Labs was co-founded by two Stanford students. Its headquarters is in San Francisco. Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies), acquired a 35% stake in Juul Labs for $12.8 billion on December 20, 2018. Juul received a $2 billion bonus to distribute among its 1,500 employees.
The Juul became the most popular e-cigarette in the United States at the end of 2017 and has a market share of 72% as of September 2018. Its widespread use by youth has triggered concern from the public health community and multiple investigations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA made a huge error by allowing the use of inhaled vaporized often flavored nicotine–without the need to prove safety or efficacy. They were given a five year window to study the results. Now the unintended consequences are unfolding with illness and deaths related to e-cigarettes. Up to 25% of school children in middle and high school have been vaping flavored products. Belatedly regulations and restrictions have been put in place by some states. But do we have a new generation of nicotine addicts who will now switch to smoking?
In the meantime, because of the $2 billion dollar bonus related to Altria’s investment in Juul, the 1500 employees are set to receive $1.3 million each.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Marlboro-maker Altria is taking a big financial hit from its multibillion-dollar bet on e-cigarettes.
The tobacco giant on Thursday slashed the value of its investment in the beleaguered vaping company Juul Labs by a third, dragging down its results to a financial loss for the quarter.
Richmond, Virginia-based Altria bought roughly a third of Juul for $13 billion last December. But executives said they would take a $4.5 billion write-down on the investment amid a growing crackdown on Juul and the vaping industry at large.
Since last year, Juul has been hit by new federal and state investigations into its marketing amid an explosion of underage vaping among teenagers. Separately, an outbreak of lung injuries tied to vaping has led to new government warnings around e-cigarettes. No single product or ingredient has been identified as the root cause.
Mark,
In 2010, I wrote “The Social Network” and I know you wish I hadn’t. You protested that the film was inaccurate and that Hollywood didn’t understand that some people build things just for the sake of building them. (We do understand that — we do it every day.)
I didn’t push back on your public accusation that the movie was a lie because I’d had my say in the theaters, but you and I both know that the screenplay was vetted to within an inch of its life by a team of studio lawyers with one client and one goal: Don’t get sued by Mark Zuckerberg.
It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates. I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong.
But this can’t possibly be the outcome you and I want, to have crazy lies pumped into the water supply that corrupt the most important decisions we make together. Lies that have a very real and incredibly dangerous effect on our elections and our lives and our children’s lives.
Last week I worried that Elizabeth Warren had painted herself into a corner by endorsing the Sanders Medicare-for-all plan. It was becoming obvious that she couldn’t stay vague about the details, especially how to pay for it; and some studies, even by center-left think tanks, suggested that any plan along these lines would require large tax hikes on the middle class. So what would she come up with?
Well, the Warren plan is now out. And I’d say that she passed the test. Experts will argue for months whether she’s being too optimistic — whether her cost estimates are too low and her revenue estimates too high, whether we can really do this without middle-class tax hikes. You might say that time will tell, but it probably won’t: Even if Warren becomes president, and Dems take the Senate too, it’s very unlikely that Medicare for all will happen any time soon.
Nonetheless, Warren needed to show that she was working the problem. And she did. She brought in real experts like Donald Berwick, who ran Medicare during the Obama years, and Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the Labor Department. And they have produced a serious plan. As I said, experts will argue with the numbers, but this is the real thing — not some left-leaning version of voodoo economics.
How does the Warren plan expand Medicare to cover everyone without raising taxes on the middle class? There are four main components.
From Crosscut: Social workers, doctors, and nurses meet patients in untraditional settings, including tents, vans and shelters.
Chuck King has experienced homelessness, off and on, since he was a teen. While he worked in construction from the time he was 18 until his late 30s, a profession from which he derived great pride and joy, he said he also spent most of his life on the streets or incarcerated.
Originally from Tacoma, he moved back to Seattle a year ago to be closer to his roots after years of traveling around the West Coast. He was living on the streets and battling illness. He had been in and out of the emergency room at Harborview and was suffering from pneumonia. Then a friend told him about Plymouth Housing, a nonprofit supportive housing facility that takes into account an applicant’s health status.
King, who is 68 years old, applied and was accepted into Plymouth. But shortly after settling into his studio apartment, King received a shock. He was diagnosed with heart failure and was told he had only six months to live. His doctor at Harborview provided him with a referral to hospice care, and soon he began receiving visits by a nurse from Providence Hospice of Seattle.
Although we like our access on line to our electronic health records, many of us don’t like the computer sitting between the doctor and us. The doctor doesn’t like it either. ZdoggMD has several rapp videos about this issue.
“A 2013 study published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information discovered emergency room doctors spent an average of 44 percent of their time on data entry, compared to 28 percent on direct patient contact. This is concerning because it can make patients feel neglected. It can also lead to misdiagnoses if physicians don’t spend enough time talking to or observing the people they’re treating.”
Thanks to Ann M for finding this in the NYT
BELLINGHAM, Wash. — The year is 2019, the place is the United States, and a black man walks into a foundry wanting to cast some bronze grenades.
This is how the American artist Ed Bereal, 82, recaps preparing for his first retrospective at the Whatcom Museum here.
Creating new work for his politically charged exhibition “WANTED: Ed Bereal for Disturbing the Peace” raised some eyebrows in this predominantly white coastal city 20 miles from Canada.
There was the foundry, Mr. Bereal said, where the staff was hesitant to serve him until a friend who happened to come in vouched for Mr. Bereal’s artistic intentions. And that was before Mr. Bereal had explained that the grenades would stand in as testicles in an installation about the apocalypse.
Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.
Then there was the print shop. Mr. Bereal said that when the owner realized the images the staff were printing for him likened President Trump to the Antichrist, the cost of services quadrupled. Mr. Bereal found another printer.
Below is a rather long commentary on the City Council race and the funding involved. Please comment or send your thoughts in by email if you wish.
From Alice W: Below is an essay Nick Licata distributed today. I think everyone who attended the candidates’ forum this week would enjoy. I was surprised that at that forum the questions did not include one asking how much money the Council has spent defending Sawant. The Googled answer to the question came back “$258,000 as yet.”
Subject: Urban Politics – Why Big $ is Pouring Into Seattle Council Elections
Seattle’s city council election this November has seen a record breaking amount of funds being spent by Independent Expenditure Committees (IEs).
Urban Politics – Seattle – October 25, 2019 by Nick Licata author of Becoming a Citizen Activist
Why Is So Much $ Being Poured
Into the Seattle Council Elections
This UP issue is also available to read on my blog
(http://www.becomingacitizenactivist.org/blog/) .
Seattle’s city council election this November has seen a record breaking amount of funds being spent by Independent Expenditure Committees (IEs). Amazon’s $1.5 million contribution to the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce IE called Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE) drew national attention, with both Presidential Candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders condemning it. But many folks don’t understand how Independent Expenditure Committees (IEs) influence our democratic process.
Normally candidates can receive no more than $500 from a single donor, person or business. If they take public funding through Seattle’s democracy voucher program, then that limit is $250. However, IEs have no limit on how much they can receive and disperse to support , or oppose a candidate, as long as that candidate does not have anything to do with the IE. Basically, wealth distorts a fair distribution of verifiable information to the voters. CASE and its allied IEs have mounted such attacks against candidates that are deemed to progressive.
By Knute Berger from Crosscut
For more than a century, the eternal conflict in Seattle politics has been a power struggle between the business community and the left. The Potlatch Riots of 1913, the General Strike of 1919, the labor unrest on the waterfront in the ‘30s, the Civil Rights era in the ‘60s and even the confrontations over globalism and free trade during the WTO protests of 1999 have all reflected the ongoing wrestling match. In one corner: the chamber of commerce; in the other: the socialists and labor of one flavor or another.
And the match continues with the current Seattle City Council elections. Business groups are pouring funds into district races in hopes of electing a more business-friendly city council. Amazon alone has dumped nearly $1.5 million into this election cycle via the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee, an unprecedented financial outpouring. The battle lines are largely defined by downtown business-endorsed candidates and the so-called far left city council incumbents.
Thanks to Gordon G – this will keep you smiling!
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