THE BIG BAD WORLD IN NUMBERS

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We are fond of saying that the world is small and indeed, air travel has drastically shortened journey times. But when you’re blasting over any territory at 500 MPH while at 40,000 ft and you’re probably half asleep for most of it, then the full magnitude of what’s below is lost on you. There are the dimensions of the place, the amount of people living there and what their chosen place is in this rapidly changing world. I got thinking about that as I strolled near the river lately and it led me to wonder just how much I don’t know, so I went looking it up naturally.

At the time, I was watching four engined jet trails streaked across the sky from west to east and it made me feel how insignificant we Irish actually are. So the idea for this article began first as an insular effort to determine some facts in the (possible/unlikely), event of a United Ireland at some distant future point. What are the indisputable facts of the matter? From an Irish perspective, you can easily visualize our little landmass from outer space on a clear day but how many of us would be sharing the Emerald Isle together when and if? Well, in the Northern six counties there are 1,811,000 people, both Sammys and Taigs of course. Here in the Southern 26 counties there are 4,780,000 decent God-fearing souls, (wink, wink!), so together we will number over six million assorted Paddies of various hues and shapes. Sounds like a lot to me.

So far so good then! The land mass of the this Republic currently stands at 84,421 km² and if you add the North to that, we’ll become a massive continent of 98,551 km². The North’s GDP is about a fifth of ours and with one of them for every 2.6 of us, they’re going to have to improve on that performance. At this point, I could drift into comparative personal productivity versus average gross earnings in both parts and then I could even speculate how together our rising tide could lift all boats but I’ll leave serious shit like that to David McWilliams.

Because you see today, what has me riveted is the perilous state of the whole world, not our little windy rock in the Atlantic. From time to time I like to take out my atlas to gain a world perspective and when I do, I keep getting it wrong. This is because my atlas gives me a Mercator projection, which is a projection of a map of the world onto a cylinder in such a way that all the parallels of latitude have the same length as the equator, used especially for marine charts and certain climatological maps. Flattened out onto a page then you get this perspective distortion. As I look at it, Greenland is bigger than Australia but in reality, Greenland has a landmass of 2,166,086 km2 whereas Australia comes in at a whopping 7,692,000 million km².

So let’s look at the Middle East then, for no other reason than it always seems to be in the news for all of the wrong reasons. As a boy growing up, my first memory of a place called the Middle East was the mention of the ’67 war, (ironically the summer of love here). The victor in that war was Israel with a population now of 8.547 million coming from a country with a total area of 20,770 km². Ireland is far larger. In the years since that war, Iraq has been in the news, (437,072 km² and 37.2 million unfortunate souls). Years after ’67, Saddam Hussain had been persuaded by the Americans to start a war with Iran because the mad mullahs in Iran had taken over and were holding 57 American hostages to stick it to the Yanks. Eight years and eight million dead later there was a truce which pretty much put things back exactly as they were pre-war. You see, Iran is bigger than Iraq, (1.648 million km², nearly four times bigger), and has more people too, (80.28 million versus 37.2 million). You’d have to wonder what the lad Saddam was smoking back then?

But comparisons in the Middle East can be weird if you are a student of the Mercator projection. Is Egypt bigger than Saudi Arabia for example? Off hand, do you know? Well, this student always presumed that the cradle of civilization was far bigger than the hot sandcastle. However, the Saudi’s are sitting on 2.15 million km² of real estate while the Egyptians have half of that at 1.01 million km². But then there are only 32.28 million Saudis versus 95.69 million Egyptians and they have the Nile to fertilize their valleys. There’s a war in Syria even as I write, a country with a land mass of 185,180 km² and a ‘damned’ population of 18.43 million suffering souls. To my way of thinking, the mayhem in the Middle East in my lifetime and before it, is all down to the super powers of the day. The Arabs and others were unfortunate enough to be born on top the world’s greatest reservoir of oil and gas and they are getting cut to shreds for just that sin of birth, beginning after WWII. Islam is a side show to deflect interest from the main prize.

So in Super Power terms then you must begin with the good old U, S of A. There 350 million of them living in a nirvana of 9.8 million km² of God’s own country. Big isn’t it? But then I check to discover that Canada is even bigger, (at 10 million km² approx) and there’s only 36.29 million Canadians, so there’s more leg room up there so to speak. By comparison, China is slightly smaller than the US at 9.59 million km² but they manage to house 1.379 billion little people, more than the States by a cool billion, (and then some as the Yanks might say). God help the Russians and their lethargic reproductive organs because there’s only 144.3 million of them and they inhabit the single largest country on earth at 17.1 million km².

The EU is no slouch either. With an area larger than the USA, (10.18 million km²), we have a much larger population standing at over 500 million, currently including the UK. But can you envisage us going nose to nose with the Yanks on the battlefield? Can’t see it myself. But then I don’t see the Russians wanting a shamozzle with the Yanks either, though they do seem to finally be putting their foot down in some areas. The Americans view the Middle East as their sole playground to do with as they please. The Ruskies however have historical links with Syria and Iran and appear to be carefully drawing the line there. While the Americans have been stamping all over the world these last few years because, as they like to remind us, they can. They threaten all of us on this planet if they’re foolish in their dealings with the Russians and none of us will thank them for that!

Meanwhile the wily Chinese are camping out in, of all places, Africa. Have you any idea just how big that place is? You could fit the whole of the USA, Canada and the EU in Africa and still have room for Australia. Doesn’t look that way on my atlas but there you are anyway. With 30.3 million km² of land and a total population of 1.216 billion people, it is significant and the Chinese believe it is full of economic potential. Across the South Atlantic lies South America covering an area of 17.84 million km² and with a combined population of 422.5 million people, a damned big consideration in terms of Global Affairs methinks. And south of that continent lies Antartica, which comprises 14 million km² but with a tiny transient population of 1,000 to 4,000, depending on the season. If the ice cap ever does melt down there, you can expect a dirty rush to exploit whatever the place has. The vested interests will be all over the place like flies to shit.

Then there’s Asia. Wow! We’re talking 44.58 million km² with 4.463 billion assorted nationalities busy doing what they’re doing. The biggest Muslim populations are there in places like Indonesia and Pakistan. Pakistan as well as China and India are three of the select club of nuclear armed nations and I’m leaving out North Korea for now because we all live in hope, don’t we? Industrial powerhouses such as South Korea and Japan are in Asia and many see it as the emerging economic superpower of the new century. China has the largest standing army in the world, in case you didn’t know and the inscrutable oriental is no fool either. You have to wonder sometimes that on the eighth day when the Lord awoke, did he take a quick peep and say to himself, ‘Ooops”.

Think of the above mix of facts as the core ingredients of a boiling stew and then throw in human nature, politics, banking & high finance, Mother Nature, greed, avarice, jealousy, carelessness, stupidity, madness and mortality and then ask yourself, is a United Ireland all that important in the grand scheme of things?

PHARMACEUTICAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

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A guy I knew some years back was a senior employee in a large Pharmaceutical Company in Cork. He was highly intelligent and assured and very obviously comfortable in his life.

One night I waxed lyrical on the (possible) wrongs of the Pharma. Industry in general, while being careful not to point any specific finger at his employer. Maybe I was only hopping the ball in the hope of starting a lively debate but his response surprised me. “You have no idea how bad they are,” he muttered darkly. Of course I pressed him and begged and pleaded for more but he wouldn’t say much more about it. To finally kill the conversation he pointed me to some book on the subject whose name I had forgotten before I got home.

But as a customer of theirs with a deep suspicion that they bankrolled a lot of the anti-tobacco efforts in order to push their own alternatives as a result, I did a little digging. I knew before I started that they were in the business of making money and growing their business. As a result of that, you would have to conclude that It is not in their financial interests to prevent common diseases. Indeed the maintenance and expansion of diseases is a precondition for the financial growth of this industry. That alone is a very dangerous conflict of interest because they must publicly portray a caring determination to cure disease with their products while endeavoring to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The marketplace for the pharmaceutical industry is the human body, but only for as long as the body hosts diseases. When a disease is cured in a particular patient, they stop buying the pills and cease being a Pharma customer. A steady line of revenue is lost and if you extrapolate that out to a wider population, well you could see how those big companies might quickly start to shrink. Nothing I’m saying here is incorrect and in fact it makes perfect sense if you think it out. But I believe most people don’t even want to go there. Instead they prefer to take the tablets and live in hope.

To further expand their pharmaceutical market, the drug companies are continuously looking for new applications for the use of drugs they already market. For example, Bayer’s pain pill Aspirin is now taken by 50 million healthy US citizens under the illusion it will prevent heart attacks. Remember, Viagra was originally conceived as a treatment for hypertension until it was discovered that it had, ahem, not unpleasant side effects. It limped along in the limited hypertension market place until the marketing men got the horny news and then Viagra positively, ahem, sprung into life.

But on a serious note. Did you know that the acknowledged deadly side effects of prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the industrialized world, surpassed only by the number of deaths from heart attacks, cancer and strokes (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998). In an earlier piece entitled, “Good pill, Bad pill,” I listed the side effects from the maker’s own small print on my own medication and it surprised even me. From the company’s point of view, the advantage of listing them, (in six-point text on a cluttered page), is that they lower their chances of being successfully sued.

By market valuation, the combined Pharmaceutical Industry is absolutely massive. In 2001, worldwide revenue was around 390.2 billion U.S. dollars. Ten years later, this figure stood at some 963 billion U.S. dollars. In 2014, global pharmaceutical revenues for the first time increased to over one trillion U.S. dollars. This provides billions for marketing. While a small amount of this is aimed at the general public through mass advertising, the Pharmas spend the bulk of it on the medical profession. Well, think about it a moment. You would not voluntarily stop off at a chemists shop out of the blue one day and on a whim, buy some heart disease or cancer treatment medications, would you? For that to happen, you would have needed a confident doctor to present you with a prescription and warm you sternly to get and take such medicine in order to avoid dying. Knowing this equation, the companies begin their activities in the Universities at first year med. They sponsor and help to write the textbooks and medical manuals, they confer with the Professors and lecturers to keep them abreast of new medicines and treatment and they hold open nights with inducements for aspiring doctors to come and be trained/brainwashed on the miracles of their latest offerings. For any GP in practice, the medical rep can be the source of a golfing holiday abroad if the required amount of their medicines have been prescribed. Is it any wonder then that the budding graduate’s first recourse in any patient setting is the prescription pad and biro.

This state of affairs is further aided by general, or mass advertising aimed at the healthy. How many times have you seen one of their ads that lists common complaints such as, tiredness, coughing, waking up at night to pee, stomach ache, dizziness, periodic breathlessness, headache, irregular bowel movements, loss of appetite, on a list of ten items on a billboard. The punchline will always read something like, “If you have experienced any three of the above ‘symptoms’ in the last month, contact your doctor immediately. The company behind the advertisement is likely to have been holding a promotion to GP’s in that area recommending their particular pill as the treatment for all ten things on the list. It nearly goes without saying also that in any given month you will likely have experienced at least five of the items listed. It’s called marketing!

All of the above is true and correct but to go even further, one needs to move into the realms of speculation without hard proven evidence and assume also that ethics in medicine can be bought. My friend from the past that I alluded to, was hinting darkly about the more secretive actions of ‘Big Phama.’ Specifically, that the cartel of the largest ones have purposely suppressed the cure for cancer for example. The conspiracy goes that they discovered a cheap and successful method of ensuring nobody got cancer, (or somebody else did), and the ‘cure’ was entombed in lead and buried thousands of feet under. Dark stories abound all over the free space about cures for many things which died with their inventor. This is speculation but on a similar note, there actually was a man who did invent a device to run cars on water much to the chagrin of the oil companies and the motor industry. He of course died in mysterious circumstances and his invention never saw the light of day.

Another troubling idea that is difficult to swallow, if you presume a high standard of ethical behavior, is the notion that Big Pharma do spend millions “creating” diseases and epidemics in labs in order to profit from the treatment/s they are also working on in parallel. In business, this would be called creating a new market and the best market ever is the captive market. It has a profound effect on the bottom line and is hugely popular with investors. Developing and selling medical treatments from the high moral ground of unquestionable integrity is a very difficult thing to do, especially with the huge margin medicines, such as those to treat cancer. You see, poor people get cancer and most cannot afford the best remedy. In theory then, the members of the high moral ground of unquestionable integrity would provide the charity of free medication to those short of money. Pigs might fly! They consistently brazen that one out and indeed spend a fortune suppressing any such stories lest people begin to question their combined integrity.

In short then, at the very core of modern medicine lies a huge anomaly and yet another question of trust for the whole society regarding an essential institution, which should be above reproach. Is the Pharmaceutical Industry itself a deadly epidemic that could take us all with it, or is it, as portrayed, a force for good.

What do you think?

PUBS AND SKY SPORT

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“Publicans ‘may feel under pressure’ as Sky takes 100s of cases against pubs illegally showing matches. Sky says it takes the matters to court to protect its actual customers, while publicans say the cost of a subscription is too costly.” according to the Journal

This interested me because up to a while ago, I used to go to my local to watch sport, (and to drink beer and chat of course). The man who owns that pub is a mine of information though it doesn’t take a genius to see how lowered drink driving limits, the smoking ban and a changing culture have decimated his pub industry. The Cotton Ball Pub beside me can accommodate hundreds of customers and used to do so fairly regularly. Now however, it is only on Saturday night and Sunday that the patrons come anywhere near that number.

But as an inheritance from an earlier time, the place has seven large screens and one enormous projector screen. He has to license from Sky for each one of these based on his turnover. “Padraig Cribben, VFI chief executive, claims that such a set-up may cost up to 10% of turnover and that’s turnover not profit.” Sky is creaming from the top and the bottom. Cribbin added: “The two single biggest drains on pubs are Sky and insurance.” The insurance bit is health & safety’s scam.

But Sky hires private dicks to sneak around pubs in an effort to discover who is not playing Sky-ball with them. They have coded into the signal a graphic of a pint half full, which appears on the top right hand corner of the screen and if it’s there, the screening is Sky-legal. If it ain’t, the publican is using a (paid for), domestic connection to broadcast commercially, hence the Sky court case.

But pay-TV as regards sport has become a racket of its own. There was a time when all sport was shown on the Sky channels. Then BT muscled in with a few sports channels of their own and took a lot of premiership games with them and a lot of good rugby too. Naturally there is a different license to pay to use that. Another couple of sports channels then were likewise provided by ‘eir’ . Tennis, like the recent Wimbledon, can show up with the standard package on BBC or Eurosport. The latest Sky boxes in Ireland don’t allow you to tune into any of the ITV’s so Roy Keane’s punditry for the World Cup wasn’t available to his old neighbours here in Mayfield for love nor money. The decent pub attempting to cover all of the sport’s bases for their clientele could end up paying many thousands every month along with all of their other overheads.

The Cotton Ball is trying to do just that but I have noticed a new phenomenon quickly developing. This is, that most sports fans are barely watching the expensive offerings on any of the eight screens because they have their snouts in their so-called smart phones betting money on other sports elsewhere that they are monitoring on the phone’s web access, also supplied incidently through fast pub fibre Wi-Fi, another must apparently. A lot of the time too the sound is turned down. Nobody takes any notice of match build-ups today either, because they get the team news in advance on their bloody phones before they even get to the pub and the gabling odds are more important anyway.

Smaller poorer pubs in rural areas, I have been told, are simply learning how to plug their laptop into the big screen and are streaming free sport content from the Web for those customers who wish to look at it. Over the last several years I have only been to one pub, (in West Cork), that had no TV’s whatsoever. The theme there appeared to be to talk rather then stare at the goggle-box. The reality of the modern Irish pub, outside a few super pubs in Dublin, is that if you visit on a weekday afternoon, you are likely to be the only customer with several big screens surrounding you all paid for but switched off. Instead, some pop station blares out endless forgettable modern music at a level making it hard to think, never mind speak. The original good Sky Sports idea has now become another nail in the Irish public house coffin. I imagine things are similar in the UK too.

Sky executives though, will not see that and maybe don’t even want to know. Instead, they imagine large crowds sitting eagerly around screens that they didn’t provide, in pubs they don’t support, all staring intently at their content, which they overcharge for. This is the captive audience they no doubt tell their advertisers about. Huge money is flowing into Sky from both of these revenue streams and that’s why some mediocre players in the Premiership are taking home £200,000 a week. But it has gone too far and is all becoming a bit toxic. Pubs are still closing and those not under severe pressure are turning to good food to attract back some custom. The Wilton, opposite the CUH in Cork, does an incredible carvery every day and though the sport is on two or three screens, there is no point because you can’t hear a thing. If there is no sport then Sky News plays silently away in the distance. You see, people sit there enjoying their food and actually talking to each other. How amazing!

We are still a sports mad country but more and more, people do not have the concentration span to look at a full game/race/competition from beginning to end. Instead they seek multiple video-bites to inform and entertain themselves with highlight moments like goals and these they find on the web-connected smart phones anywhere they go. Much like the internet is killing newspapers and terrestrial television, it will do for pay-TV channels like Sky as well.

They just got too greedy and stupid, the pay-boys that is.

GOOD LORD, IT’S THE PRECIOUS CHILDREN AGAIN!

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As a teenager living with my widowed Mother and one sister, we had a regulated home routine. The only money we got each school morning was the bus fare so there wasn’t a penny extra for sweets or fags. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner at home and that was that.

My sister cooked dinner during the week and my Mother took over when she was finished work for the weekend. The food was always good but there wasn’t too much of it until Sunday lunch and the roast meat in full battle dress. This was the norm also for most of my friends and we never questioned it.

As regards television, we had one channel and then a second came along but both were rationed by the ‘notebook’ You see a notebook and pencil sat atop the telly and we were duty bound to record in it all of our viewing time with day, date and the duration of the programme/s. The ration during the working week was thirty minutes per night not counting the news or any educational programming. This too we respected with the odd grunt of dissent. I would watch F-Troop, I Dream of Jeannie or the Hillbillies when they were on but in general, screen time was viewed by adults as unproductive when there was studying to be done. As a result, a few short years later when I had my own flat and TV I tended not to bother that much with it.

So two stories recently in the Irish Examiner caught my eye. One claimed that, “Childhood obesity was seen as inevitable,” while the other had the line, “Parents felt utterly disempowered when it came to managing their children’s smartphone or computer usage, because there was no clear guidance,”

Ah for fucks sake, I thought, are there any true parents around anymore? What’s that shit about no clear guidance? In the family home it is the responsibility of both parents to provide the guidance in all matters for their kids, full stop. As regards what the brats eat, that’s up to you also. Mobile phones and computers can be simply switched off by the authority figures and any moaning about that could risk further penalties. You’re either in charge of the kids for their protection and development or the tail wags the dog.

Then there’s this! “There is near complete normalisation of the childhood obesity epidemic,” a health expert told an Oireachtas committee, and I have two comments to make about that. It’s not the business of any Oireachtas committee to go poking their nose into what you feed your kids, it’s your business as a parent. And as regards the ‘concerned’ health expert in this matter, that’s her job riding on this and unless something drastic is done about it she risks collecting the dole.

The story suggests that the kids today are plodding slowly about with their noses in screens to exclusion of life going on around them. What they really need is a good kick up the hole, a little food rationing in the home accompanied by a strict workout regime. But what they’ll get is political interference that they won’t notice because they’re too fat and busy with their expensive phones to bother tuning into reality. So the adults will get new laws with bans and fines for the parents of tubby brats who are disconnected from real life and the crafty politician behind all of it will get advancement and more power in his chosen career.

Where did normal common sense go to and when?