Health Tips

Stromectal — a pill containing ivermectin, a drug used to prevent heartworm in dogs — kills head lice resistant to first-line treatment better than malathion-based lotion.

from: http://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20100310/pill-kills-hard-to-treat-head-lice?src=RSS_PUBLIC

Environmental Hypocrisy: A new study shows that people are more likely to cheat and steal after buying green products. (Sharon Begley, 3/09/10, Newsweek)

“Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors,” writes Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in a paper scheduled for publication in the coming months in Psychological Science.

Two new experiments suggest there is something to this. Mazar and Zhong had 156 volunteers (University of Toronto students) visit online stores that carried mostly green products, or only a few. [...]

Volunteers who bought up to $25 worth of ecofriendly stuff from the green store shared less money ($1.76) than those who purchased from the conventional store ($2.18). (Just to be clear, the volunteers were not given a choice about which online store to patronize.) For the green buyers, altruism in the dictator game decreased. More alarming, when the green buyers were then given a chance to cheat on a computer game, and lie about it to the scientists in order to win more money—basically, to steal—they did. Buyers of conventional products did not. And in an honor system in which they took money from an envelope to pay themselves their winnings, the green buyers stole six times more than the conventional buyers did.

“In line with the halo associated with green consumerism…people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products,” Mazar and Zhong write in their upcoming paper. But they “act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products.” Or, as Mazar put it to me, “we are more likely to transgress morally after we have bought ourselves some moral offsets” (analogous to carbon offsets: buy enough so you can drive that Hummer). It was especially striking that the moral balancing occurred in an area of life—being generous with money, cheating on a computer game—that has nothing to do with green behavior. “This suggests that if we want to change people’s behavior for the better, we have to be sure it doesn’t backfire,” says Mazar—starting, perhaps, by eliminating the halo of self-congratulatory, smug virtuousness that surrounds green behavior.

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BrothersjuddBlog/~3/V9qYH7vFnC4/scue_me_while_i_polish_my_halo.html

What Happened to Obama’s Middle Path on Health Reform? (Michael Gerson, 3/10/10, Real Clear Politics)

Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the health reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president’s public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, re-engaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president’s ambitions.

It is quite an accomplishment. [...]

The final reason for Obama’s failed argument on health reform is neither structural nor strategic. It is psychological. As the evidence mounted that the body politic was rejecting Obama’s health system transplant, Obama faced a choice about the nature of his presidency. He could retreat toward incrementalism or insist on transformation. Obama had previewed his impatience with incrementalism during the campaign. Similar to his predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama turned hard against the Clinton model. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” he said, “in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

Just as Nixon was a liberal in the FDR tradition and Bill Clinton a conservative in the Reagan tradition, the UR needs to go with the flow.

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BrothersjuddBlog/~3/3Mv3tBdQYLI/were_only_midway_through_the_t.html