my cubic centimeter

"Deaths from all types of cancer in the US fell by an estimated 33% since 1991, saving a cumulative 3.8 million lives, according to a report released yesterday by the American Cancer Society. Progress was attributed to improvements in cancer treatment, EARLY DETECTION, and significant drops in smoking." All good news.  However, if early detection is so important to saving lives, an irrefutable logical conclusion would simply be that suspending it would INCREASE those deaths.  We don't know yet, but it is likely that we will eventually learn, the government's policy to do just that will reveal such an increase.  This may already be evident in the rise in what is called "excess deaths".  What's certain is that THIS won't be as widely reported. “Far More Human Lives Have been Lost over the past century as a result of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital than from smoking cigarettes.  Would it therefore be appropriate to require every copy of Das Kapital to carry a w...

 In the 1959 comedy film, “The Mouse That Roared”, the fictional tiny European nation of Grand Fenwick must come to terms with an economic crisis that is threatening to bankrupt the country.  The cunning Prime Minister devises a plan sure to restore economic well being to the country.  They simply declare war on the United States.  Apparently, the Prime Minister is sufficiently familiar with recent examples of American foreign policy to understand that, by going to war with the great superpower of the West...and losing...such a scenario would usher in great sums of foreign aid to the former, and formally vanquished, adversary.  Problem solved. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as planned – which is so often the case in many plans of international machinations – even with, and perhaps especially for, the United States. This comedy reminds me so much of the “news” and associated historical drama that is being imposed on all of us now by our mainstream media...