Well in the Netherlands people wear a different bracelet if you are elderly. And the bracelet is ‘do not euthanise me’. Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. But half the people that are euthanised every year, and it’s ten percent of all deaths, half of those people are euthanised involuntarily at the hospitals, because they are older and sick.

And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country. Because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, that they will not come out of that hospital to [unaudible].

Look at what has happened just in our tolerance of abortion. Fifty years ago, people who did abortions, sixty years ago, people who did abortions were, you know, in the shadows, or people who were considered really bad doctors. Now abortion is something that is just accepted. Well, of course people do abortions, it’s legal, it’s fine, there are no moral and ethical problems. This is the erosion, and it happens in the medical profession, and it can happen very fast, and I think Obamacare will lead us down that road.

Almost every single sentence he uttered is a filthy lie. Not shades of gray, an alternative interpretation or statistical slight-of-hand - just a complete lie. The elderly in the Netherlands do not wear bracelets saying "do not euthanise me". All euthanasia in the Netherlands is voluntary, can only occur following multiple independent consultations and even then only in the case of unbearable pain. Euthanasia accounts for ~1% of total deaths in the Netherlands, not 10%. Health care provision to the elderly is higher in the Netherlands, not lower, and there is no shadow health-care system of Dutch fleeing over the border because they are afraid to go to Dutch hospitals. Abortion rates in the US are lower than they were 50 years ago, thanks to contraception, and abortion-related deaths are much lower, thanks to safe provision of medical services. "Obamacare" will not increase the number of abortions provided.

This is the man the majority of Republicans want to be the next President of the United States. And that says a whole lot about Republicans.

On a related note I would be amiss if I didn't take this opportunity to vent on our own website, the University of Leuven. The website is, of course, in Dutch, but they have a helpful link on the top of every page to the English version. For all but the simplest pages you need to navigate in the Dutch version, because critical intermediate pages don't exist in English. Then you get to the page you want in Dutch and click "English version". Sometimes there is an English version and the buttons links you to it, sometimes there is an English version and the button takes you back to the homepage instead of showing it to you, and sometimes there is no English version and you get taken back to the homepage. Oh, and do you think you can use the handy Google Language Tools for 1-click translation, sorry but the University has somehow disabled this option.

---

* Actually, Google Maps is now fixed, a vast improvement from when Maps would override your language preference to show you directions in the local language, making one of the best tools for travellers rather irritating. Now if only they could fix the ever-shrinking text - I zoom in and in to try and read the microscopic writing, only to find them taunting me by shrinking it further and further - but that, dear reader, is a peeve for another day.

The strength of the book is in demonstrating the basic premise: that violence is in decline. In graph after graph, Pinker lays out the evidence for a world that has been becoming ever more pacifist. The trends go back centuries, but are most striking in the past 60 years - war fatalities, executions, homicides, violent assault, rape - all have been consistently falling. Pinker makes an iron-clad case that the past is not to be glorified; far from being a golden age, it was a savage "morally retarded" time. We only need to start going back a few decades to return to racial segregation and lynching, legal prosecution of sexuality, a subordinate status for women and routine physical abuse of children. The numbers don't lie, this is a better safer time than has ever existed. Each generation is becoming less violent and more liberal on personal rights and freedoms.

Pinker's attempt to explain why this decline is occurring is less rigorous and more "hand waving", and his ideas of changes in population genetics would not stand up to any mathematical modelling. But it is still an incredibly important book just for attempting to explain one of the most radical changes in human behaviour that has ever occurred.

Hayden had some slightly lighter reading while I concentrated on Pinker

The general strike was in response to a proposal to cut the real wages of union members across Belgium. The strike ground Belgium to a halt. No trains, no buses, no metro meant that many people just didn't go to work. Antwerp Port and Charleroi airport both closed down, and as I walked down Avenue Louise that day I could see that many small businesses followed suit.

This is not the real Di Rupo, unfortunatelyThis made a lot of people angry, because it was so inconvienent. But you know, that is kind of the point. The unions need to create some inconvience, otherwise they get completely ignored and the conditions of workers deteriorate. And the invonvience shows something profoundly important - union workers are the backbone of the Belgium economy. Politicians in Belgium effectively went on strike for 541 days, and it caused less inconvienence than a one hour railway strike. Imagine if investment bankers, speculators, CEOs and financial lawyers all went on strike for a day - would anyone even notice? The problem as I see it is that workers are not rewarded according to their real contribution, but rather according to their proximity to financial decision making. In the peverse economy, the rich get paid enormous amounts to do nothing, while the poor get paid very little to do all the work. All the hot air praising the CEO or investment banker for the achievements of the entire economy is simply rubbish, studies that look into professional CEOs vs up-from-the-factory-floor CEOs show no difference in long-term company prospects. Similiarly, business growth has actually declined as the CEOs and financial sector has sucked up more of the wealth. In essence, we are paying the parasite to suck more blood. The popular response in Belgium should have been "wow, I didn't realise how much we depended on union workers, I guess maybe we should reward that contribution".

The protest by Belgian firefighters was on a distinct but related issue, that of pensions. Firefighers currently retire at 58, while politicians would like to see the retirement age creap up to 67. The firefighters are protesting based on an emotive call that their profession is much more physically demanding than the average office-worker's - and certainly anyone imagining a 67 year-old rushing into a building on fire would have to see the absurdity. But I would like to see them also articulate the rationale economic argument. The low retirement ages of many public union workers is not a gift - the workers traded pay rises for earlier retirement over decades of union-government negotiations. Now the government wants to steal back the earlier retirement while giving nothing in return. This is simply a case of workers being shafted, no ifs or buts about it. The workers took lower pay for a retirement bonus, now the economic neo-liberals in government (who has taken over the economic policy of all major parties) want to remove that retirement bonus without compensating for the pay sacrifice that workers made to get it. It is breach of contract.

I'm sick and tired of the fake argument that worker's pensions need to be slashed. There is no impending demographic crisis. Yes, the population that is over 65 has been steadily increasing, but that is irrelevant. The correct figure is the percentage of the population that is in the workforce - and this has been steady or rising, and will continue to do so. The increase in the population over 65 is compensated for by a decrease in the population under 18, so the average number of non-workers that each worker needs to support hasn't changed that much. Add to that the steady increase in female workforce participation, and Belgium will have a better proportion of workers in the next 50 years than it did in the last 50 years. Finally, if cuts did need to be made, how about cutting the pension of the richest down to what everyone else gets? The rich earned more their whole working life, why should they get higher pensions once they are retired? If they spent all their money rather than saved it, so sorry but they'll have to live like everyone else.

Consider Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs owned $2 billion worth of Apple stock, and he never once had to pay a dollar's worth of tax on it. How could that possibly be true, you may ask? Well, the increase in stock value is not considered to be income until the stock is sold, using the quaint notion that only banknotes have real value. Everyone apart from the IRS understands that Apple stock has some value, so Steve Jobs could take out loans for anything he could ever want. No bank would refuse to lend Jobs $100 million for a luxury house, knowing that he had $2 billion in Apple stock. So these cashed up billionaires can still live the billionaire lifestyle without selling the stock and without ever paying tax. Oh, and now that Jobs is dead, his family get the $2 billion in stock and even if they sell it they won't have to pay any tax on it, because the clock will start ticking from the 2012 share price not the 1997 share price that he was given it at.

These are the people who actually make iPhones
I know, I know, Jobs was the greatest inventor since Leonardo Da Vinci and you really love your iPhone. Still, the guy is worth $2 billion and doesn't pay tax? Isn't that just sick? And for anyone who protests that "job creators" need to be tax-free because otherwise they will get stroppy and either refuse to work or will flee the country: do you really think that Jobs wouldn't have been amply rewarded with a "mere" $1 billion? A 50% tax rate still would have left him with far more money than he could ever spend. Mark Zuckerberg is even worse, with $28 billion worth of stock that he hasn't paid tax on. I'm joining the call for a Zuckerberg tax.

Lydia came up with the bright idea of using this to trick Hayden into eating some solids. The first attempt was a cooked lasagne sheet. I pretended it was a map, but Hayden was too smart for that, and refused to bite. Lydia's second idea was pure genius - sheets of nori. Hayden tore into the sheets of seaweed with a passion, and ate his first self-directed meal.

The "Father of Paediatic Medicine" (he was not Western)Using the historical perspective, we talk about traditional medicines and modern medicine. Traditional medicines were a diverse set of health practices with a strong regional basis, so it is fair to talk about Indian traditional medicine, Chinese traditional medicine, Aboriginal traditional medicine and so forth. Western traditional medicine was one of these regional practices, and involved practices such as blood-letting, prayer and a bunch of (mostly lethal) herbal treatments. Modern medicine grew out of an algamation of the best practices of all of these traditional medicines, while discarding the worst practices of each.

The centre of modern medicine has shifted over time: it certainly has not always been "Western". Indeed, western Europe was the backwater of medicine for thousands of years - while European doctors were prescribing leeches for every condition the Islamic world was pioneering medicine that we would truly call modern. The foundations of modern paediatrics, pharmacy, surgery and ophthalmology were all set in the Islamic world, drawing on traditions from Greece to Egypt, from Persia to India. Western traditional medicine has probably contributed less to modern medicine than most other traditional medicines. In the 19th century it could be argued that the most advance occured in continental Europe, and in the 20th century in the Anglo-American world, but today modern medicine is truly a global endevour, and the research community is the most international of professions. To call modern medicine "Western medicine" is to cherry-pick that moment in time when the Western world was the leader, ignoring all that came before it and has developed since. Visiting a hospital in China, Ghana, Peru or America you will see the same techniques, philosophy and equipment, making modern medicine "global medicine".

Alternatively, we can talk about medicine using the methodological perspective. Here there have been two major approaches to medicine, the faith-based approach and the evidence-based approach. In general, traditional medicinal practice is based on faith in the effectiveness of the medicines. Western traditional medicine is no different - the use of prayer as a standard healing technique is an obvious example of faith, but equally the adherance of physicians to blood-letting for a thousand years despite all the patients it killed was a sign of faith in the technique, rather than a constant reapprasial of its success. Likewise other traditional medicines are a mismash of techniques, some that work well, some that do nothing and some that can be fatal, but all diligently implemented as the knowledge is transmitted whole rather than critically analysed.

The evidence-based approach to medicine is radically different. It takes hypotheses from tradition or new research, and then simply puts them to the test. If they work they stay, if they fail they are discarded. If anything, the ability to discard failed techniques is the most important aspect of evidence-based medicine, and the key distinction between modern medicine and traditional medicines. Modern medicine continually gets better because it is open to any new ideas but it throws away the ones that don't work. "Alternative medicines" do not throw away techniques that have been proven not to work, so the stagnant approach maintains both harmless voodoo approaches and harmful treatments.

So modern medicine at its best is pure evidence-based medicine, willing to take in any treatment from any tradition, so long as it passes a scientific test. Scientific enquiry is not uniquely Western, it is the shared inheritance of the world and was developed as a global endevour. To call science "Western" is to have a parochial view of science, taught as a school subject where the home-grown heroes are the only figures worth mentioning. We don't call evidence-based engineering "Western engineering", so why do people insist on calling evidence-based medicine "Western medicine"? We don't let self-trained self-proclaimed "alternative engineers" erect skyscrapers, so why do we allow "alternative healers" to treat patients in genuine need?