Surviving the NHS

Yesterday I went to the funeral of a friend's father at an old country church, a lovely ceremony attended by many family and friends. He was 98 and had lived a most interesting and useful life, for example having served in the Second World War as a radar expert in the Royal Navy - limited to the rank of Able Seaman so that if captured by the enemy they would not think to sweat military technology secrets out of him.

In 2009 he suddenly fell ill and was taken to hospital. When my friend got there he found his 86-year-old father lying untreated, unhydrated and basically on the Liverpool Care Pathway - a euphemism for the decision to let the patient die of planned neglect, thirst and withheld medication.

My friend spoke to the medics and the conversation went along these lines:

Why isn't my father in surgery?

- We're afraid he might die on the operating table.

What will happen if you don't operate?

- He'll die.

Get him into theatre now, or there will be consequences.

Two hours later, father was opened up; it turned out to be a burst ulcer, which was successfully treated.

He had another twelve years of fully alert life and the loving attention of his family.

And if my friend hadn't fought...

FRIDAY MUSIC: Placido Domingo, by JD

Well known in the world of opera, Placido Domingo became a household name after his appearance as one of The Three Tenors at the FIFA World Cup in 1990. A recording of their concert in Rome on 7th July 1990, the evening before the World Cup Final, sold ten million copies! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carreras_Domingo_Pavarotti_in_Concert

Luciano Pavarotti died on 6th September 2007; Pepe Carreras now devotes most of his time to the foundation which bears his name, the Fundació Internacional Josep Carreras per a la Lluita contra la Leucèmia (known in English as the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation) which he had established in 1988 after his own recovery from leukemia.

Placido Domingo who is now 81 years old continues to perform regularly -

"Placido Domingo returned on the stage of Wiener Staatsoper on Monday (15th November 2021) to his childhood and his artistic roots with an unprecedented Zarzuela recital at the Vienna State Opera, a stage where he has been operating for more than half a century and whose audience confirmed their absolute loyalty today with an ovation of more than ten minutes." 

(The video is not from this week's recital but is a 'medley' of previous shows at the Wiener Staatsoper.)

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 18 November 1961

Rising to  #4 this week: Jimmy Dean with 'Big Bad John':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

13 November: 'Ten days after pressure blew the cap from a natural gas well in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, the "world's biggest fire" started, sending flames 600 feet high. Firefighting expert Red Adair would extinguish the blaze on April 29, 1962, with 660 pounds of dynamite.'

The finale is here (no sound); Adair's own four-part account starts here.

14 November: 'The Shah of Iran gave Iranian Prime Minister Ali Amini the go-ahead to begin the "White Revolution", a comprehensive series of reforms aimed at improving education, combating poverty, and eliminating corruption over a period of ten years.'

16 November: 'Dr. John Lykoudis, of Missolonghi in Greece, received a patent for the antibiotic medicine he had devised to effectively treat peptic ulcer disease, thought at the time to be caused by excessive stomach acid rather than by bacteria. However, he was rebuffed by the Greek government in attempting to obtain trials and approval of the medication, which he called Elgaco, and by medical journals. In 1983, three years after Lykoudis died, Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren would confirm that ulcers were indeed caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, which thrived in acidic environments.'

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/helicobacter-pylori

17 November: 'The first successful launch from an underground missile silo was achieved by the United States, with a Minuteman-I missile being sent up from Cape Canaveral, Florida.'

    More on the Minuteman program here: http://npshistory.com/publications/mimi/srs.pdf

18 November:  'West German pediatrician Widukind Lenz of Hamburg appeared delivered his findings at a meeting of the German Pediatric Society, making the link between the morning sickness pill thalidomide and phocomelia, a birth defect causing missing limbs. Dr. Lenz found that in 17 out of 20 cases of defects that he had investigated in Hamburg, the mothers had used the medicine, marketed there under the name Contergan. By contrast, there had been only one case of phocomelia out of 210,000 births in Hamburg between 1930 and 1955. A reporter at the meeting broke the story the next day in the German national Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag.

(Images source)

UK chart hits, week ending 18 November 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

Covid haha - let's see if this gets through

UPDATE: Against all expectation, they did indeed publish my comment.

____________________________________________________________

Oh, how silly Covid-worriers are, according to Open Culture:

How the World’s First Anti-Vax Movement Started with the First Vaccine for Smallpox in 1796, and Spread Fears of People Getting Turned into Half-Cow Babies

I comment:

'Does this imply that there are no reasonable grounds for concern about the mRNA injections invented to combat Covid? 

'Please direct us to evidence to show that these novel treatments (a) are as safe as vaccines that have been tested and cleared for medical use in the ordinary way, and (b) that they offer effective protection against the virus to the recipient, and help prevent onward transmission to others.

'Or are we simply expected to submit to groupthink? Perhaps a test for that will be whether you allow this comment to appear.

'I write as someone who has been 'double-jabbed' and is about to get the 'booster' - as a personal calculation of the balance of risks - but feel that there are risks which have been downplayed (and benefits that have been exaggerated) under the pressure to nudge us into a rushed mass acceptance of a still-experimental intervention.

'You mention Thalidomide: coincidentally, this very week sees the 60th anniversary of West German pediatrician Widukind Lenz's public report of the association of the drug with phocomelia cases in Hamburg. In that case, the print media were quick to publish, starting with the Welt Am Sonntag.* How different from today, with widespread suppression of news and views that do not fit the official narrative.'

*https://www.welt.de/gesundheit/plus181669270/Contergan-Claus-Knapp-verhinderte-weitere-Fehlbildungen.html

Well now, let's see how open Open Culture are; or will they turn out to be more like the ignorant and arrogant Remainers in the Brexit debate?

Is China going to kill off all the world's fish?

 

Veteran China-watcher 'Serpentza' says that China is operating a massive illegal raid on fish stocks - including protected species. According to him:

Officially China has 2,500 ships in its fishing fleet, as compared with the USA's 300; but the real figure is estimated as closer to 17,000. 

The ships can stay out for years because of a support system of large vessels that resupply them with fuel and other necessaries, and collect up the catches from many ships and take them back, refrigerated, to the mother country. The fishing fleets can stay on station, so foreign nations' sovereign coastal stocks are under constant siege.

The fishing is hi-tech and indiscriminate, and law-breaking: against international law, the ships play about with the transponder system that lets them be tracked, so that they can turn off their transponders, raid other countries' waters at night undetected and then go back outside the sovereign area and turn the signals back on. The leaders of corrupt countries are bribed to cooperate or look the other way. 

Sensitive, protected zones such as the waters around the Galapagos Islands are being trashed, for the second year running. Species protected by law, such as the hammerhead shark, are not only caught up in the vast nets but especially prized in China, commanding higher prices as a result.

These activities are not, says 'Serpentza', illegal in China itself, so little or nothing will be done there.

Will fish and other marine wildlife go the way of the tiger, the rhino and all the rest? What will the sea be like when this 'grab it all today' madness comes to an end?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Marty Stuart, by JD

Country music star Marty Stuart was something of a child prodigy being invited to play mandolin in Lester Flatt's band when he was just thirteen. After a spell playing for Johnny Cash he then began a career as a solo artist. Currently he has a band called the Fabulous Superlatives and it is no exaggeration to say the band lives up to that rather grandiose name!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Stuart

A slightly different format for this week's music with the first video being a radio concert by the band plus an interview with Stuart (approx 24 minutes) and the final video is also longer than usual ( about 23 minutes) with Stuart telling the story of his musical journey which, of course, has not yet ended!

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 11 November 1961

 At #4 this week is Bobby Vee's 'Take Good Care Of My Baby':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

6 November: 'Heinz Felfe, West Germany's chief of counterintelligence for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), was arrested by his own agents. Felfe, a former Nazi, was discovered to have been passing secrets of the American CIA to the Soviet Union and to East Germany since 1959, revealing the identify of more than 100 CIA agents in Moscow.' 

    A 2013 (German-language) film about Soviet penetration of the German secret service is shown below.

See also:

• https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/20/docu-a20.html
• https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/nazis-and-post-1945-german-intelligence-service/

7 November: 'The most damaging blaze in Southern California history, up to that time, destroyed 48 homes one of the wealthiest areas of the United States in the Hollywood Hills, including the houses of actors Burt Lancaster, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Joe E. Brown.'

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/150-years/sd-me-150-years-november-7-htmlstory.html

Also on 7 November: 'France secretly set off its first underground nuclear explosion, and its fifth overall since joining the nuclear club on February 13, 1960. Confirmation was not given until nearly three weeks later.'

9 November: 'Brian Epstein saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern Club for the first time, and signed them to a contract by December 10.'

The above was recorded by Granada TV at the Cavern Club in Liverpool on August 22, 1962. (The next day John married Cynthia Powell.)

https://www.beatlesbible.com/1962/08/22/live-cavern-club-liverpool-218-beatles-first-television-appearance/

10 November: 'What would become the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut began nine days after Estelle Griswold of the Planned Parenthood League and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a clinic in New Haven, providing the means for birth control to patrons, in defiance of a Connecticut state law prohibiting the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". Ms. Griswold and Dr. Buxton were arrested and would take their challenge to the law all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which would rule in 1965 that laws that infringed upon marital privacy were unconstitutional.'

UK chart hits, week ending 11 November 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm