Antibiotics Overuse

Sometimes problems seem insoluble, that does not mean they are. We have been told about a coming apocalypse due to many people no longer responding to antibiotics. At least 700,000 people a year die from drug-resistant infections. Antibiotics have been overused not only with humans but with cattle, because some time back it was thought that giving them to cattle would make them grow faster. The consequence is that as those antibiotics affect the whole animal, and in turn the meat we eat, we end up ingesting more antibiotics than we realized. Now several things have shown that when used together they make a difference. It started with an experiment by a USC psychology professor and because the results were Continue reading “Antibiotics Overuse”

Fears and Fear

An article about why some of us crave fear tickled my concern. It cited the research of Dr. Katherine Brownlowe, a behavioral neuropsychiatrist at Ohio State Medical Center. I googled her to see if I could get more information on her research. I wasn’t able to which of course does not mean it is not important. And too newspaper articles’ renditions of scientific research has been known not to provide full contexts and end up misleading. All that acknowledged, my concern is not lessened. The article was trying to give some idea of what it is that makes people seek Continue reading “Fears and Fear”

About a Child Predator

Rare is the person who does not cringe with horror at the sexual exploitation of children, and when the crime involves traveling to another country as well as trafficking it is particularly difficult, for me at least, to exercise compassion. Ronald Gerard Boyajian of Palos Verdes, California, a well to do section on the southern end of the Los Angeles basin, kept traveling to Cambodia to have sex with young girls. In 1995 he was convicted of sexually exploiting two girls—whom he had apparently bought in Cambodia from their mothers and grandmothers—he went there to have sex with even younger girls. He had been convicted Continue reading “About a Child Predator”

Food Waste and The Cult of Perfection

The idea that we are wasting a lot of food is not new, the idea that we insist on produce to be perfect, is not new either. What is new is the extent to which food is wasted. Also new is that the waste is not limited to households and restaurants, but throughout the whole food chains, farmers, packers, truckers, food researchers, academics and even government officials all attest to how much waster there is. How much depends on how it is measured, whether it is from “farm to fork” meaning the whole food chain, or Continue reading “Food Waste and The Cult of Perfection”