And if your weren't depressed already...

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New Scientist

Death special: How does it feel to die?
Is it distressing to experience consciousness slipping away or something people can accept with equanimity? Are there any surprises in store as our existence draws to a close? These are questions that have plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries, and chances are you've pondered them too occasionally.

None of us can know the answers for sure until our own time comes, but the few individuals who have their brush with death interrupted by a last-minute reprieve can offer some intriguing insights. Advances in medical science, too, have led to a better understanding of what goes on as the body gives up the ghost.

Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain - the modern definition of biological death.

If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about 10 seconds before losing consciousness. They may take many more minutes to die, though, with the exact mode of death affecting the subtleties of the final experience. If you can take the grisly details, read on for a brief guide to the many and varied ways death can suddenly strike...


Blog scoops from yesteryear

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It's extremely frustrating not to be able to blog about my wife's work. Lots of interesting snippets come my way almost every evening but I am forbidden to mention or even allude to them on pain of the standard Calabrian punishment - a thousand cuts followed by being fed, alive, to the pigs! OK, she might not go that far (we don't keep pigs for a start) but she would get very cross.

However by a happy coincidence she did tell me a story about some health workers in Kent, where the recent c. difficile scandal took place and, as she no longer works for that council I can repeat it here.

In 2005 Sandra hosted a seminar at the Sessions House (Kent County Council's headquarters) which was attended by, amongst others, three senior Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells health managers. The Sessions House is quite an imposing building which usually draws admiring comments from visitors so Sandra was rather bemused by the fact that the three managers seemed most impressed by the...lavatories! They said, in effect, that they would love to have lavatories in their hospitals with the same standards of hygiene and cleanliness as those at Kent HQ.

Do what?!

Interestingly, the managers thought their chief executive, Rose Gibb, who was appointed at a time when the trust had huge deficits and poor performance indicators, was absolutely wonderful. Significantly, the doctors had a rather different opinion and couldn't stand the woman. Well, Ms Gibb got on with the job of reducing the deficit and improving the stats, no doubt to the delight of her masters but, whoops, in the process she seemed to have lost sight of one rather important aspect of her job - maintaining patient care.

Ms Gibb was paid £150,0000 a year plus about £7k in benefits and received a 'substantial' severance package when she resigned last week. The Health Minister has said this evening that the package is to be suspended pending further inquiries. Not much comfort to the relatives of the 90 dead patients but at least they won't be having salt rubbed into their wounds, yet.


Party on

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Father and son beaten after 150 YouTube thugs gatecrash birthday party

Why do parents let their children have parties in their homes? What is the point? Neighbours complain about the noise. There is the constant anxiety that something awful will happen when you're not looking. Your carpets are probably going to get puked on, or worse. Something is bound to get damaged or stolen. A trip to casualty is a forgone conclusion. And all for what?

The kitchen is usually crammed with people talking and hogging the booze. Morose young women block the stairs or lock themselves in the bathroom to tearfully discuss their relationship problems. Everyone decides at some point that the wrong sort of music is playing. You walk in on people you've never met before groping each other on your bed. And at the end of it all you have to try and get rid of everyone before the sun comes up. No! Fuck off!

If you want your child to have an enjoyable party, hire a pub or a hall or a restaurant for the evening. Oh, and don't let anyone come back for a 'nightcap' either.




Bourn to spend

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Sir John Bourn, guardian of the public purse. In three years he's run up bills of £365k on travel and £27k on meals. Then there's opera, grand prix, polo ... 
As England's chief investigator into Whitehall waste and extravagance, Sir John Bourn, the comptroller and auditor general, monitors billions of pounds of government expenditure and private contracts from business to run state services every year...

Yesterday, in an unprecedented move for "open government", the National Audit Office (NAO) volunteered details of all Sir John's restaurant bills since 2004, the full cost of all his foreign trips and details of reciprocal entertaining he has received in the past six months from large accounting firms and leading government contractors who do business with his office.

The total travel bill for him, his secretary and, on 22 occasions, his wife, is more than £365,000 for the past three years. Over the same period he has run up a meal account approaching £27,000.

Never mind terrorists

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Errors caused infection outbreak

A report has found a "litany" of errors in an NHS Trust's poor handling of the infection clostridium difficile, which resulted in 90 deaths... Failings included a "targets obsession" and staff shortages so dire that nurses told patients to "go in their beds"... The Healthcare Commission concluded that C.difficile was definitely or probably the main cause of death for 90 patients. It was definitely a contributing factor in the deaths of a further 124, and a probable factor in another 55... The trust's chief executive, Rose Gibb, resigned last week.
And we worry about Islamic terrorists? The NHS kills off more people every year in the UK than died in the 9/11 attacks. Ms Gibb is unlikely to face any kind of prosecution (although there has been talk of possible manslaughter charges, we'll see).

Health Secretary Alan Johnson is interviewed on Today about what is being done to improve hospital hygiene standards. Listen to the streaming audio here:


"In the process of granting Iraq sovereignty, the Bush administration eviscerated it."

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Mercenaries, murder and mayhem: How a little-known rule promulgated by the Bush administration in Iraq let loose the dogs of war - The Smirking Chimp
On June 27 2004, the day before the United States was to grant sovereignty to a new Iraqi government and disband the coalition provisional authority, Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, issued a stunning new order. One of the final acts of the CPA, Order 17, declared that foreign contractors within Iraq, including private military firms, would not be subject to any Iraqi laws - "all International Consultants shall be immune from Iraqi legal process," it read. "Congratulations to the new Iraq!" Bremer said moments before flying out. His memoir, My Year in Iraq, neglects to mention Order 17.

The author of Order 17 was a CPA official named Lawrence Peter, who oversaw the Iraqi ministry of interior. As soon as the CPA was dissolved, the private security company association of Iraq hired Peter to act as its liaison and lobbyist there. The new Iraq included a revolving door.


Wind and smoker proximity - WTF?

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Reason Magazine - Your Place: The Final Frontier
During Prohibition, making and selling liquor was illegal, but drinking it was not. With tobacco, we are moving toward the opposite situation, where it will be legal to make and sell cigarettes but not to smoke them.

A smoking ban recently approved by the city council of Belmont, California, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco, is so sweeping that saying where it does not apply is easier than saying where it does. Smoking will still be allowed in tobacco shops, in automobiles, in some hotel rooms, in private residences that do not share a floor or ceiling with other private residences, and on streets and sidewalks, assuming you can find a spot that is not within 20 feet of a smoke-free location...

The official justification for these ever-more-intrusive smoking bans is that the slightest whiff of secondhand smoke poses an intolerable hazard. The Belmont ordinance claims tobacco smoke is "extremely dangerous," regardless of dose, and warns that even "exposure to outdoor secondhand smoke may present a hazard under certain conditions of wind and smoker proximity." (emphasis mine)
World gone mad, mad, mad arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!


Kalm down dear

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Friends in high places.

Ellee Seymour
A week ago I wrote here about the disgraceful service I was experiencing from Tech Guys, who have had my laptop for two months and failed in that time to replace its broken screen or communicate with me what was happening. My experience with them was a nightmare.

Little did I know that it would end up being investigated by Lord Kalms (pic)himself. He is the life president and former chairman of DSG International which owns Dixons, Currys, The Link and PC World outlets. Tech Guys are based in PC World, as well as other outlets.

Unknown to me, my difficulty was brought to his attention by Iain Dale after he read my disgruntled post. I was amazed when I received this email early yesterday (7.17am) from Lord Kalms’ PA
For those without a link to Lord Kalms here's my computer buying advice.

1) Keep away from high street outlets (except John lewis).
2) Get an extended at-home service contract .
3) Buy a Mac.
4) Have a 16 year old son who can strip and rebuild a computer in his sleep!




Never forgive, never forget

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LENIN'S TOMB: Mea Culpa, mea minima culpa
If you're worth anything as a human being, you should hate (Thomas) Friedman and all his kind forever. Through the centuries they have pathetically and sycophantically rented themselves to power, and have always sought excuses for their crimes and outrages. If anything, they have said, the Emperor has not gone far enough: he should have committed genocide. He was too enlightened, too moral, too zealous in his defense of goodness. And when at last their charlatanism has taken them to such lengths of absurdity that their earnings are threatened, they have simply cut loose and blamed the devil for their misdeeds.

All I got was this bloody T-shirt

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Blood & Treasure: el furibundo
..all this stuff about whether Guevara's morally fit to be thought of as a hero is entirely beside the point. Heroes are part of a mythological mindset and any cursory glance at Odysseus, Beowulf, or Egil shows that they can be very nasty pieces of work. It’s necessary for any hero’s life to end in tragedy as a precursor to apotheosis, and tragedy is only possible if the hero has massive human flaws...

Conforming to pattern, a hero also has to do other things: journey across the sea, slay monsters etc. Guevara fit the plan exactly. It’s part of the Kennedy mythos too (think Khrushchev as Grendel), and he was probably responsible for more deaths.


I wanted to post something on Guevara and the so called moral dilemmas we all apparently face about whether to hang that poster or wear that T-shirt (as if) but I'm tired and my gums still hurt from the extractions so I was chuffed to see this piece by Jamie on Che. Also worth a read is Robert Scheer's Truthdig piece, 'The Martyring of Che Guevara':
These days, few politicians in the United States even seem to care about the subversive Cuban influences in our own backyard that once haunted them. The embargo on Cuba remains to mollify Florida’s aging Cuban community, but what’s important to Washington today is Mideast oil, not protecting the peasants of Bolivia from the likes of Che Guevara.

On Monday, Che’s death was marked, in the Bolivian village where he was killed, by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who proclaimed his movement “100 percent Guevarist and socialist,” which hardly registers as a propaganda success story for those favoring CIA assassinations. They turned a failed—and flawed—guerrilla fighter into an enduring symbol of resistance to oppression.