Ganga, Tirukoṇamalai, and Salt Spring Island

Remember those British bastards who screwed up the lives of people all over the world?  For ever and ever?  How could you not?  After all, we are all products of the white supremacists' empire building!

They haunt me even when I go far, far, far away!

Yes, I am pointing to "Ganges" on the sign-post.

Notice the small little Salt Spring Island?  Of course, it is way small.  But, of course, no island was too small for the island that is increasingly irrelevant to the world!

Zooming into Salt Spring will reveal the reason behind the title of this post:

The spot marked is Ganges, and the channel to the north and east is, as you can read it, Trincomali Channel.

Yep, at a location that is about 49 degrees north of the Equator is Ganges by Trincomali Channel.

The backstory is all about the British colonial bastards.

Ganges Harbour, from which Ganges takes its name, was originally called Admiralty Bay but was renamed by Captain Richards in 1859 after HMS Ganges, and indirectly after the Ganges river in South Asia.

What about Trincomali Channel? "It is named for HMS Trincomalee which was assigned to the Royal Navy's Pacific Station at Esquimalt in the 19th Century."

The island had been home to indigenous people for about 8,000 years.  And then, one day, the white man arrived.

The rest of the story unfolded as one would hypothesize: Small pox wiped out most of the natives.  The women "married" the white invaders, the marriage then making it "rightful" for the white man to claim property that was not otherwise claimed through guns.

god save the queen, of course!

Whose life is it anyway?

“If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

That is one tough question.

If I give consent to my own death, then I won't even be here after a while to find out what happened; after all, I will be dead!

On the other hand, when the person is "Sue Rodriguez, a 42-year-old suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S." it is not merely a theoretical thought experiment.

 The NIH fact-sheet on ALS is an awfully depressing read.  What a curse to be afflicted with that disease.  Which is why Rodriguez wanted to have a doctor-assisted-suicide. And it was in that Canadian legal battle in 1993 that she said, “If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

The NY Times piece reports that she lost the case, which was taken up later by other patients and lawyers.  Now, this has become legal in Canada, and "the Canadian system puts doctors and nurse practitioners at its center."

The legal victory made possible 78-year old John Shields to schedule his death well into an incurable and terminal heart disease.  The report can be emotionally challenging to read; imagine then how intensely emotional it would be to watch a loved one die.  Right?

Here in Oregon, it is "20 years since Oregon voters passed the nation’s first death-with-dignity law."

Washington became the second state to adopt a death with dignity law, followed by Colorado, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Montana joined the list by court order. What may prove to be the turning point came in 2015, when the California Assembly approved a death with dignity law, tripling the number of Americans who can choose to end their lives on their own terms. More than 20 other states are now considering their own death-with-dignity laws.
Other states, including California, have patterned their laws on Oregon’s, which allows a patient with a terminal illness who is expected to die within six months or less to request life-ending prescription drugs. The request must be witnessed by two people and approved by two physicians, and the patient must be determined to be mentally sound. Last year, 204 people in Oregon requested the drugs and 133 people used them. That’s less than 0.5 percent of all deaths.

Of course, in Oregon (and in the other states too) patients have to self-administer the life-ending chemical cocktail.  Physicians are not allowed to press the syringe, unlike in the Canadian or Dutch euthanasia procedures.

The letters to the editor reflect the typical concerns and worries that we might have on this extremely difficult topic.  As one letter-writer notes there even when disagreeing with such an exit, "The growing discussion of dying well is a welcome and needed one."  Yes.

Chart of the day: beer

A former colleague used to joke that his body was a temporary storage facility for beer :)

Does banning asbestos hurt poor countries?

In 2002, I visited my school, where I studied and played and goofed around!  All the way until the 12th grade. (lots and lots of warm memories--about the teachers, fellow students, hmmm ... maybe I should visit the school later this year?)

All the buildings seemed much smaller when I visited the school after 21 years--a result of having been used to the sizes here in the US.

I am pretty sure that many of the buildings continued to have the same asbestos roofs that were in place when I was there.  I am no buildings expert (editor: are you an expert in anything, other than commenting? No problems--I will check with dad who is a civil engineer!) but I am sure even in the photo here the roof is asbestos.

Except for a couple of months when the temperatures were pleasant, the 6th through 8th grades that I think we spent in these buildings were always warm/hot.  It was a different life when we didn't care much about the heat and dust.  And neither did we care that there was asbestos all around, particularly in the broken pieces.  Even drainage pipes had asbestos.

Asbestos, from which we run away here in the US because of its carcinogenic effects, is an inexpensive and robust material in the poor countries.  The school that I attended is a relatively affluent school in an affluent town.  To have the kind of roofs it does and the facilities it offers is one awesome dream for, I would reckon, three quarters of the billion-plus who live in that country.  The millions living in slums would love to have asbestos roofs, instead of the tin sheets, or thatched roofs ...

Asbestos is a huge industry even now, as this chart from the BBC shows.

It is not difficult to understand why it is used a lot in poorer economies.  The crazies thing here is with Canada--it is one leading producer and exporter, even though "What is mined in Quebec is a different kind of asbestos - white asbestos or chrysotile - the only kind now used commercially worldwide. Countries like Russia, China, Brazil, and India - although not Canada - use it widely as a cheap and effective building material."

Talk about ethics--Canada does not allow using asbestos within its borders, but mines and exports asbestos for others to use?  It is like Norway--those peace-loving tree-hugging Scandinavians extract and export quite a few millions of barrels of petroleum that is a major polluter :)

Oh well; we can't all be Gandhis and practice what we preach!

A Canadian Univ honors the Dalai Lama. So, China bans the univ.

The White House kowtowing to China over the Tibet/Dalai Lama issue is not anything new.  And with the strained Sino-US relations--recently over Taiwan, the currency, Iran's nukes--, I suppose China sees an opportunity to up its rhetoric.
But, to aim its guns at a university?  And that too in Canada? Over the university honoring the Dalai Lama?  Yep,  that is what happened:

China has taken the University of Calgary off its list of accredited universities, most likely because it gave the Dalai Lama an honorary degree last September when he visited Calgary, according to the Calgary Herald. The university has about 600 students from China and is trying to find out what the sanction means for graduates who are back in China, as well as for current students. ... The Tibetan spiritual leader did not go to the campus but received the degree at the start of a conference in the city.

Rationing through "Medicare for All"

A few years ago, when I was at CalState, the Ethics Institute brought Peter Singer to campus. Oh boy, was there a crowd! It was not because there was a huge fan base; there were lots and lots of people upset with his arguments that did not agree with their interpretations of life, death and how to deal with them. I doubt whether the campus ever had such a security presence for a visiting philosopher :-)

To his credit, Singer does not shy away from controversies, and the recent NY Times magazine essay is an example of that. In discussing how "rationing" has unfairly become a dirty word in the healthcare debate, Singer asks:

Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

A simple question, right? How much are you willing to pay? We do this individually all the time, whether it is for the pets at home, or for the humans we love. Yet, this is practically an unspeakable topic, and how we arrive at these decisions is supposedly not because of dollar calculations.

It is something similar to a question I typically ask my intro class students when we discuss population. I ask them how many children they think they will have. Most think it will be 1, 2, or 3. I ask them then "why not six?" Their responses are, say, "I won't have time for that many", or "I won;t be able to go on vacations with that many kids" .... to which I then state that this is nothing but cold economic calculations: children are expense items that take money away from other possible spending options. We, therefore, "ration" kids.

Singer writes:

The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?

Indeed.

Plagiarism is ok: not in academia, but in politics!

So, the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, is the latest in a long line of politicians who have used other people's ideas without acknowledging that they borrowed those ideas. We academics call that plagiarism, but apparently the practice is par for the pols.
A Canadian columnist writes in the Toronto Star:

Academics and journalists are particularly conscious of this sin. When Rae says that Harper might have been expelled from university for stealing someone else's words, he's right.
But politicians – unlike students – regularly borrow without attribution. Indeed, given that few practising politicians write their own speeches, most are guilty of intellectual theft.

Oh well!

Higher education funding

The grass is always greener on the other side!
The Canadians are concerned that their spending on higher education is falling behind spending in the US, and elsewhere. And we in the US point to spending in other countries as proof that we need to up the ante ....
Excerpt from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Four-year public universities and colleges in the United States have significantly more resources for teaching and research than their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and Britain, according to a report by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.
The resource gap between Canadian and U.S. universities in particular has been growing over the past 30 years