Mold to the Rescue
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 16 Mar 2004 13:00:00 GMT
I had a toothache all weekend, starting sometime Friday. It was above
a root-canaled and crowned molar, an infection that I've had three or
four times in the last few years. I ate garlic over the weekend, but
it got bad enough that I took aspirin (actually Motrin, ibuprofen,
since that's what we had) in the middle of Sunday night to get back to
sleep. So I called my dentist, and he called in a penicillin
prescription. I dropped $10 at lunchtime yesterday for 28 pills. After
taking three of them, the pain was almost gone last night. Now I'm
facing six days of yogurt (to keep my stomach alive). Allopathic
medicine is really good at what it's good at. The dentist recommended
a couple of years back that I see an oral surgeon to drill into the
jaw above the tooth and cap the ends of the roots so this wouldn't
happen any more. It would cost me two days out of work, likely quite a
bit of pain, and $350 on top of what my insurance would pay. As long
as the antibiotic continues to work, I'm sticking with it.
# Strike the Root - Bob Murphy's Columns - sixteen chapters are now available of Mr. Murphy's novel, Minerva.
# Neil Mackay at The Sunday Herald - We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That'll be £80,000 please - Unbelievable. Let's put Blunkett in jail for 25 years, charge him £80,000 when he gets out, and see how he likes it. [claire]
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
Blunkett's fight has been described as "outrageous", "morally repugnant" and the "sickest of sick jokes", but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it's a completely "reasonable course of action" as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren't in prison. The government deems the claw-back 'Saved Living Expenses'.
# Bill Whittle - And Then a Miracle Occurs... - the first chapter of Mr. Whittle's new book. Well written, as usual. A good simple explanation of why communism doesn't work. He left out, however, the obvious explanation of why representative democracy doesn't work. I helped out with the following comment: [whittle]
We'll create a society where a majority of the voting members of each geographical area elects a representative. We will trust these representatives to collect and spend tax money however they decide. And then a miracle occurs, and they use it to benefit us instead of themselves.
