Two Brechtian Commentaries on the Way of the World

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Although they’ve been attributed to him, there is no evidence that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the following words (in German or English):

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know [that] the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.

On the other hand, he did write the words below (in German). They’re from the Threepenny Opera‘s “Second Threepenny Finale”, also known as “Wovon lebt der Mensch” or “What Keeps Mankind Alive”:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
to purge us of the seven deadly sins,
should first sort out the basic food position,
then start your preaching! That’s where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well,
should learn, for once, the way the world is run:

However much you twist, whatever lies you tell,
food is the first thing, morals follow on.
So first make sure that those who now are starving
get proper helpings when we all start carving.

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
in keeping its humanity repressed.

It’s not as catchy as “Mack the Knife” or “Alabama Song”, but it’s still pretty good.

Your Doctors Might Kill You But Going to the Dentist Will Be a Breeze

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Two pieces of medical news caught my eye this past week.

First, according to the New York Times, physicians at the highly-respected University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are going to start putting selected patients to death. Not through improper care, but on purpose.

The idea is that patients who come into the emergency room on the brink of death because of a life-threatening injury will occasionally have all of their blood replaced with freezing salt water. That means their hearts will stop beating and their brains will stop working. They’ll be dead.

This will be done in order to give surgeons more time to do their job. Instead of having a few minutes to address the gunshot wound or other injury, they may have up to an hour to operate before the patient suffers brain damage. The medical staff will then resuscitate the patient by replacing the cold salt water with nice warm blood.

This procedure has been successfully used on animals like pigs and dogs, but never before on a person. The hospital is planning to perform Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) about once a month for a couple of years before reaching a decision on its effectiveness.

One might think that killing your patient is a clear violation of the medical maxim: “first, do no harm” (primum non nocere). But since the patients in question will already be in cardiac arrest, and very likely to die anyway, and since the kind of death they’ll suffer is expected to be temporary and should give them a much better chance of surviving their injury, it isn’t clear that the doctors will be harming anyone, at least in the usual sense.

Perhaps a more troubling issue is that patients being subjected to this kind of procedure won’t be in a position to give their consent. They’ll already be unconscious. So the medical center has publicized this new procedure in and around Pittsburgh and given prospective patients the opportunity to opt out if they choose. But the default setting in case you’re ever shot or stabbed in western Pennsylvania and end up in the UPMC emergency room will be to receive EPR (and possibly meet your maker), if you are a suitable candidate.

The other news that caught my eye is that researchers in England claim to have come up with a new treatment for tooth decay. The procedure is called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER). Dentists will use a very small electrical current to accelerate “the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth”. In effect, your tooth will heal itself with some encouragement from your dentist. The procedure wouldn’t require an anesthetic, drilling or a filling (and dentists would become more popular people).

It isn’t clear from the article in the Guardian how long it will take to fix a cavity this way. In an ideal world, your cavities could be repaired through EAER at the same time your gunshot wound was repaired through EPR. But that probably won’t be possible for a few years yet.

The Big Piece of Chicken

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In honor of responsible fathers past, present and future, here are a few minutes of wisdom from one of America’s most insightful philosophers, Chris Rock:

PS – Mr. Rock acknowledges elsewhere that many mothers work outside the home, but that doesn’t affect his point. Now where’s my big piece of chicken?

Enough Said, American Politics Edition

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Today’s New York Times “Sunday Review” cartoon by Brian McFadden. More of his work is available here. (Click to enlarge.)

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There Is A Cure For Science Denial

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Once Florida is underwater and we all have polio, it will be better.

That’s what Samantha Bee concludes in the Daily Show video here. Left-wing stupidity isn’t one of my usual topics, but it appears to be the relevant phenomenon in this case. The title of the video is “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy”.