Ottawa bungles while veterans burn

PTSD, the latest spike in veteran illness following tours of duty in both peacekeeping and actual combat, going back as far as the Korean War, and including many equally violent events while serving as UN peacekeepers, continues its invasion of the psyches of veterans for decades after their specific tour of duty.
Unfortunately, government lip-service to "support the troops" makes only a few politician-friendly headlines, without the actual steps to implement that support. In a background piece for CBC (excerpted below), Brian Stewart writes what could become a manifesto for either or both of the opposition parties in the coming federal election of 2015.
According to Stewart, bureaucratic turf wars, budgetary feuds have delayed, if not de-railed, the hiring of psychiatrists and mental health workers that Defence Department called for eleven years ago, and  after the Canadian Forces ombudsman told the government two years ago that some 447 mental health specialists were needed. And even more hypocrisy is evident in the government's setting aside $11 million for the Defence Department needs, while imposing a mind-set of deficit-slaying as the political culture. We used to call that 'speaking out of both sides of the mouth' when we heard such a story in our youth.

• Saying one thing, while doing the precise opposite, and
• claiming to be "making the streets safe" while crime rates are falling, and
• spending $50 million on job-creating programs that simply do not exist and
• generating headlines on the purchase of Fighter Jets that simply wont work and Ottawa's procurement practice failed
• transforming a balanced economy into a petro-dollar economy while strutting the world stage lecturing others on how to run their economies
• claiming to be protecting the privacy of Canadians by discontinuing the long-form census, when there were literally no complaints and professional planners needed that information

And the list could go on for chapters and books, of how this government is failing both itself and the people of the country. Read Mr. Stewart's analysis, and weep for the families of the veterans who have suffered needlessly under the negligence of the Harper government, and then ask yourself if these people deserve another  mandate. We clearly believe they do not.

Why Ottawa ignored the military's PTSD epidemic
By Brian Stewart, CBC news February 6, 2014
Most ominous still is the finding nearly buried in the same study that notes that the incidence of mental injuries can double with passing years — meaning that  fully 30 per cent of those involved in combat operations may need significant psychological and other support over many years.

Canada's former Chief of Defence Staff, general Rick Hillier has now called for a public inquiry into the mental health problems affecting Canada's veterans.  

Add to that the fact that we have only belatedly acknowledged that many of the 120,000 soldiers who served as UN peacekeepers in atrocity-ridden conflict zones have trauma rates as high as Afghan vets.
At the same time, while the number of those needing help has grown, bureaucratic turf wars and budgetary feuds seem to have delayed the hiring of needed psychiatrists and mental health professionals.
The government is only now scrambling to hire an extra 54 specialists that the Defence Department called for almost 11 years ago.
According to a recent Canadian Press report, the government was reminded by the Canadian Forces ombudsman two years ago that the overall goal of 447 mental health specialists was far from met. Still, by last month the shortfall persisted.
The delay in so critical an area seems due not to a shortage of funds, for the government set aside $11 million, but rather a reluctance to hire during a period when deficit-fighting ruled the bureaucratic mindset.
For several years now, DND has, to please the government, spent several billion dollars less than it has been granted by Parliament. The whole bureaucracy has underspent $10 billion over the past three years to help meet deficit reduction targets.
It's a vicious cycle as those who go to war feel extra mental stress when they sense their sacrifice is unappreciated, and their cause diminished by post-war indifference.
And it doesn't help when Canadians talk a bold game about "supporting the troops" but don't deliver.
Only three months ago, the military ombudsman reported that many military families were still housed in dilapidated, too-small mould-infested base housing and were feeling huge stress because of worries about constant family moves and its effects on their children.

Part 2: Corruption and its restraint....more courage and more empathy?

In order to make any quasi-judicial panel on corruption work effectively, the laws and the cultural attitudes on whistle-blowers will have to undergo a substantial transformation.
First, power figures do not take kindly to truth-telling that embarrasses them. Neither do organizations responsible to those in authority. After all, maintaining a perfect public image requires that it not be sullied with negative truths about either the people or the organization itself. Consequently, given that those in power exert the maximum amount and degree of influence on the foundational footings or roots of their specific organization and thereby of the culture generally, laws granting immunity, even support, for those with courage enough to step forward and tell their truth in the face of such a cultural and a legal climate are rare indeed.
It was once the policy at IBM, for example, that all employees were trained to include in their circle of reporting not only their immediate supervisor but also his or her supervisor. In other words, all employees were permitted to go one level above their supervisor if they had a grievance against the decisions of their immediate supervisor. While that policy relaxes the reigns on outlets for venting, it does not support or encourage going above that single level of authority and responsibility.
In most professional organizations, it is a well understood cultural norm that one does not publicly criticise another member of the profession in which one works. In that manner, doctors protect each other, lawyers and teachers and presumably accountants "cover" for each other, in silence. So only clients or patients of those professionals are able to bring a complaint to the professional body overseeing the specific profession. (At least these are the norms in Canada.)
On the other hand, "telling truth to power" is a trait that all leaders encourage in their own tight circle of workers, after also training them to bring any signs of trouble to them directly and not to "go public".
While that may be a mixed message, it is only mixed in the sense of how far the "damage" is permitted to reach. A small circle of workers in a department, or a government ministry, for example, would be expected to bring all hints and rumours and complaints to the table in that department, for immediate address and/or redress. Those seeking to sabotage the ministry from within, (and those people exist in all bureaucracies in all countries) would merely remain silent with information that would or could be damaging to their ministry.
However, we have culturally and collectively protected those in power through the implicit imposition of fear of dismissal, or fear of recriminations, without adequately balancing that goal with its corollary, the protection of the public trust. If and when a worker sees, experiences or even hears of the abuse of the public trust, in the organization or of the people responsible for upholding that trust, there must be in all organizations, the opportunity and the cultural expectation for that information to be brought forward in a manner that it can be dealt with, without causing the "whistle-blower" undo punishment or recriminations.
As a professional consultant, having once found myself in the position (documented elsewhere in this space) of being given specific information about the alcohol dependency of members of an executive team, I brought that information to the CEO privately. Unfortunately, he could not deal with the information in a professional and a compassionate manner, and rather than provide support for those with the problem, he summarily dismissed the consultant. There is no telling the lengths to which people in power, (often the most neurotic of all the people working in any organization) will go to cover up what could be extremely damaging facts, even when those facts can be addressed both compassionately and professionally. Protection of that perfect public image (mask,or persona) trumps dealing with the whole body of truth.
And, in that kind of cultural climate, there is a significant need for education in truth-telling from a very early age. "Tatttle-tales" in the school yard are immediately beaten and ostracized. One of the more frequently used revenge tactics children use against their enemies is to "rat" on them. And of course, getting the truth out on the table has to be taken into consideration along with the betrayal it evokes.
Family secrets, for example, are preserved for generations in some cases,  because no one wanted to incur the wrath of the "elephant" in the room, the alcoholic parent, or the dry drunk, equally as disturbing and troublesome as the alcoholic. We are not generally doing a very good job at a very basic level of developing the kind of courage, confidence and public support for those who need a refuge for their truth telling.
I recall an adolescent co-ed asking if she could see me after school, when she told me that her father had thrown her down the basement stairs the previous night. She needed someone to whom to tell her story, and my advice was for her to seek out the family services worker in her area to bring her truth to a place where she and it could be dealt with. As I did not hear any more about her plight, I assumed that she found the necessary support to change her situation.
On the other side of this "whistle-blower" file, is the question of how to bring about the changes that would implement the new truths in any situation. And that, my friends, is a horse of a very different colour. And we are not very sophisticated in our rehabilitative strategies and tactics. We are, however, much more inclined collectively to seek revenge, punishment, exposure and expulsion.
So we have a dilemma: we need the truth and we need to support and encourage the  truth-telling that brings that truth to the table, while at the same time we also need to recognize and support the balancing of rehabilitation and support for those who would clearly be "found out" in such a process.
And that would require an importing of compassion, sensitivity and empathy that seems to be missing. So the equation grows in its complexity....and in its requirement for inculcating both courage and empathy...neither of which seem to rank very high on the public's radar of personal and or professional expectations.

Reflections on corruption...and how it might be restrained with external, independent, objective judicial oversight

Had the chance earlier today to listen to a talk show, NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, when the guest was former Secretary of the Treasury, and former President of Harvard, Larry Summers. Of course the topic was what to do to get the American economy growing again, at a rate that would absorb many of the millions of both under-employed and unemployed in that country.
Having ruled out both doing nothing and cutting spending while people are living in often desperate conditions, Summers turned to his favourite "homily"...."If when interest rates are the lowest they have been in decades, and airports like JFK in New York are falling apart, and labour is grasping for work....if this is not the time to spend on infrastructure, then when would that time be?" While he attempted to remain both polite and professional in his disdain for the "high-jacking" of the political argument, in favour of spending cuts by the Republicans in Congress, Summers nevertheless also pointed to a stash of cash (some $3 trillion by his estimates) being locked up by corporations for what he saw as two reasons: first, tax laws permit them to avoid tax by stashing millions if not billions out of the country, so that they do not pay tax on those dollars, and second, corporations produce supply when there is demand, and as demand is low, consequently production is concomitantly low, requiring fewer workers. He also favours a hike in the minimum wage, so that there will be more competition among employers for workers.
And then, there was a listened who called in, a former member of the U.S. military, who referenced his normal distaste for anything Larry Summers says, but agrees with him on the need to invest in infrastructure. However, he is very worried that such investment would inevitably lead to corruption, graft, pay-offs and a waste of those dollars, many of them supporting the crony-capitalism that we have heard so much about in the construction of the Sochi Olympics infrastructure. And, immediately upon listening to this caller, my little mind shifted to the spate of reports out of the European Union, this week, that there is an estimated $1.3 billion in corruption over election expenses, pay-offs, and the like among all of the 28 country members of the EU. Bringing the issue to the front pages is the resignation of the advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany who wishes to transition into a plum job with a German rail company, intimately entwined with the Merkel administration. And while there are some rules about how long a political serf has to wait after leaving such a post before joining a private company to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest, and also to preserve public confidence in the political process by restricting its "connections" with people of power and former agents of government.
Lobbying, too, is another location for politicians who have been put out to pasture, either by their voters or perhaps by their families or even their own loss of appetite for the political shenanigans that are required of an elected office-holder. And here, too, there are a few rules about abstention for one or two years before slurping at that privately funded trough, in order to produce legislation that favours the clients' interests, or blocks legislation that would impeded the pursuit of profit of those clients' companies. However, there is really a revolving door between elected politicians and the lobbyist "profession" so rapidly revolving that no one can really keep track of the multiple transitions from one to the other theatre...really the same theatre, just a different "hat" to wear, so to speak.
In the municipal field of government, we have all heard of developers padding the pockets of municipal council members in order to secure passage of a zoning application. And, while that may be considered "small potatoes" in comparison with the billions documented in the EU report, the behaviour is precisely the same, the motives are the same and only the dollar amounts are different.
Governments, in too many countries, are in danger of sacrificing the "public interest" on the altar of the greedy pursuit of the golden parachute, at the public expense. Put another way, politicians run the risk, first of being found out, and then of having to deny their pay-offs, and then, tragically of having to defend themselves in court, should it ever get that far.*
We are witnessing a trickle not yet a trend, toward municipal governments seeking an Ethics Officer, in order to keep the municipal politicians in the middle of the road, in the hope that should one of their members fall into the ditch of corruption, that fall will not taint all other members of that council. Needless to say, if any government is directly responsible for the oversight of its own members, that oversight will be minimal and loose, at best and tokenism at worst. Watch carefully the work of any of the professional "colleges" conduct oversight of their members, and ask yourself if the job would not be better carried out by a completely independent and impartial judicial body.
Ask yourself similarly, if you would fully place your trust in a government which has written rules for the behaviour of its members, and then appointed a few of its own members to conduct that oversight, and then just imagine the loop-holes that those experienced and collegial and anxious members of that committee could and would find to defer, avoid, derail and even to sabotage their investigation.
Is it time for governments in the west to look differently at this issue and for the public to demand that, for example, the RCMP no longer have the power to investigate its own members, or the political class no longer retain the power and the legislation to investigate their own members, and that all professions and all governments relinquish the option to provide oversight for their own to a judicial body, appointed in a manner similar to the appointment of provincial courts, federal courts and even the Supreme Court of the land. Of course, such a proposal would require more independent politicians to render the appointment process free of political interference, to the degree that is possible, and also, it would require of those appointees a level of detachment, objectivity and ethical discipline perhaps even higher than that of the court appointees.
But if public doubt over infrastructure spending, for example, is a legitimate concern, and we certainly believe that it is, and if examples of corruption from the misuse of public funds, when the economies of many countries cannot afford such corruption, then is it not incumbent on the political class to find news ways to prevent abuse by all groups, in order to restore public confidence in our political and professional institutions.
Is the United Nations also accusing the Vatican of systematic corruption in the church rules and practices that have permitted the rate of both paedophilia and its cover-up? Is the Vatican also investigating its own evidence of corruption in the Vatican Bank, as demonstrated in the recent removal of one of the officers of that institution? And is there evidence of corruption in all public and even not-so-public institutions whenever and wherever human activity is being conducted and reported?
And, if so, are we not all responsible for providing the best oversight, the fairest due process and the most fair judgements of the contributions of individuals and groups to what seems to be a shared file?













*Interestingly, in the U.S. Congress, if a member who is under an ethics investigation by a committee of his colleagues, and resigns his/her seat, that investigation ceases immediately.

Israeli Justice Minister Livni strips hypocrisy mask from those in her own government who would sabotage the peace process

It is remarkable when a high-ranking politician, tasked with representing a government and a nation, in one of the most tangled and long-running negotiations for peace between two enemies, with deep and seemingly permanent scars from their many open and covert battles, speaks out against the hypocrisy of her own government colleagues.
And, it is also rare to hear an Israeli political leader publicly ascribe to limits on settlements, a subject she says is  being used as a  cover for the "security" card. We all know that politicians play one card for a more important card in their ideological agenda, especially whey they know that their "secret card" will cause trouble and their public card with make them seem agreeable. Playing a public game for the boss and for the media and especially for the votes of the people they represent, while all the time undermining the larger issues, in this case a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, is a ruse "up with which Justice Minister Tzipi Livni will not put"....and for that the world can be both thankful and humbled.
Would that there were more politicians with the courage, and the conviction and the intellectual heft to call out the hypocrisy of those whose secret and deceptive manipulation of the issues for their own private agenda, too often an agenda that places their personal needs and ambitions ahead of those of the nation.
We can see such hypocrisy being played out in Washington, in Ottawa and in so many other capitals, in which the nation's need is trumped by the coveted promotion of a private (held by a tiny rump) agenda. We saw it in the Tea Party's bringing the U.S. government to its knees over its intransigence in its refusal to permit an increase in taxes, as if they were the holy grail, in their hypocritical attempt to curry favour with the well-to-do cheque-writers of their political campaigns.
Hypocrisy, my friends, is a river that runs deep in the psyche of the human being. It is especially rampant among politicians, whose public face too frequently belies a different and more private, often frightened, agenda. In fact, it could be argued that the public face is the one the politician hopes will garner the necessary public support from the base of his ideological rump. Even yesterday, in an announcement of his intention not to run in the 2015 election, former Canadian Attorney General and former Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, bemoaned the reality that the Canadian parliament is so partisan that the national interests are not being addressed. He expressed the hope that in the future that would change, and a less partisan approach would emerge. Would he concur with the Israeli Justice Minister, in her calling out of they hypocrisy of his fellow MP's? We suspect the answer would be, "Yes." However, the country will not longer have the benefit of his substantial contribution, only one of which credentials found him serving Nelson Mandela as a human rights legal specialist.
It is indeed hypocrisy that is at the core of too much political rhetoric. And the world needs many more Tzipi Livni's to strip that barnacle from the public debate over all issues, in all countries, for all time. It will not happen, however, because there are still too many practicing politicians who believe they can "cover" their real and narcissistic agenda with something more palatable to the public's mind. And yet, it will take centuries before the public mind can be completely fooled by their deceptive ruse.
As the cliché goes, "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
It is hypocritical for some right-wing politicians, in all countries, to continue to deny the human contribution to global warming and climate change, when most are really protecting their pursuit of profits, at the expense of the environment. It is hypocritical for Harper and his gang to trumpet "safe streets" in his mandatory minimum sentences legislation, when he is really pandering to a constituency that cries out for "law-and-order" punishment that trumps rehabilitation. It is hypocritical for Boehner to chime loudly and frequently that he cannot "trust" the White House on immigration reform, for example, when the real truth is that he cannot bring his Tea Party colleagues to heel, and to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill. It is hypocritical of new Jersey Governor Chris Christie to tell the world, loudly and daily, that he knew nothing about the George Washington bridge closure, when we all know that it was the culture and the temper of New Jersey politics, including those in the governor's office that resulted in the closure.
It is hypocritical for governors of Republican-led states to deny the expansion of Medicaid, 90%paid for by the federal government and thereby deny thousands of their constituents health care, when what they are really attempting to do is strip the guts out of the Affordable Care Act, and they claim they are saving money in the process. It is hypocritical of the leadership of the NRA to claim that guns don't kill people, people do...when it is the gun in the hand of people on the edge (perhaps criminally, or psychologically or even financially) that does so much killing.
Imagine a world in which hypocrisy were deleted from the politicians' vocabulary! The news media would not have anything to report that would garner sales, or television ratings.

From Jerusalem Post, jpost.com, February 5, 2014
Livni: 'Hypocrites' in gov't could derail Israeli-Palestinian peace process
Chief Israeli negotiator says willing to fight for issues of wide-sweeping importance, but not for "ideological minority that prefers isolated settlements"; defends Kerry in light of recent criticism.
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni blasted on Thursday Israeli "hypocrites" whose actions could threaten to derail the ongoing peace process with the Palestinians, Israel Radio cited her as saying Thursday at a conference at Bar-Ilan University.
There are critics in the government who claim to support peace, but in actuality use the argument of security as a cover for ideological opposition to a peace agreement, the chief Israeli negotiator said.
"I am ready to fight with the world on the important issues for all of us, to convince of the righteousness of Zionism, and Israel's security needs and preservation of the settlement in Israeli territory," Livini said.
However, she added that she was "not ready for us to pay the price for the ideological minority that prefers isolated settlements."
Following the approval on Wednesday of construction permits for more than 550 new housing units over the Green Line, Livni charged opponents of the peace process with voicing false support for the talks while continuing controversial building "to the point of no return."
Livni also defended US Secretary of State John Kerry in light of recent Israeli criticism over remarks he made about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process.

WHO predicts a 57% rise in cancer cases, over half of which will be preventable...

Today is World Cancer Day, and reports from the World Health Organization are devastating in the projections of a 57% rise in the number of cases, forecasting a human disaster within two decades.
(See WHO: Cancer cases tipped to rise 57% in 20 years in imminent 'human disaster' by Tim Hume, CNN, February 4, 2014, below)
And if it is true that at least half of these cases are preventable, as the report suggests, and that governments will have to take a similar approach to alcohol consumption and sugary drinks as they have to smoking, at a time when, at least in the United States, government interferences in the lives of individuals is considered one of the most insidious threats, that kind of government action will come at a very high price.
Similarly, the prevention of air pollution, another of the significant contributors to the development of cancers, will have to rise to the top of the legislative agenda in most countries, especially those in the developed world, where much of the pollution is generated.
We have been urging common, collaborative approaches to the problems of national security, for sevveral months, without generating much if any support. Russia, for example, has proven especially insular in rejecting U.S. support in providing security for the Sochi Olympic Games, set to open in two or three days. There have, however, been murmurings coming from minor Russian voices urging some move to a common voice on matters of foreign affairs among the major powers.
However, it is not only a myopic and narcissistic commitment to restricting the size and scope of government that will impede progress in implementing the WHO report that calls for aggressive actions on prevention. The world is full of examples in which public policy and action are much more likely to be implemented following a crisis than in cases where it occurred as prevention.
The human being, it seems, either seeks the risk that prevention will not be needed, or it prefers not to have to pay for something that has not yet occurred. We have seen a myriad of examples in the child welfare sector, for example, in which action and policy and implementation followed too many crises in the lives of individual children, when prevention of the crisis in the first place would have made crisis intervention unnecessary.
However, compared with crisis intervention, there is simply no drama, and no excitement and nothing sexy about prevention. It comes when things seem to be going well and when there is no need for public intervention. Governments, traditionally, are rear-guard actions, coming in after the crisis has become full blown, and not before the impending crisis has tipped its hand. And that phenomenon, or that dynamic, will have to be one of the main focuses in any concerted, collaborative and effective response to the WHO report, calculated as it no doubt is, to generate as much public concern as possible.
We commend the WHO for its collective courage even to publish such a report. Sometimes there is a tendency to avoid telling the patient the impending danger of a lifestyle over which the individual seeks to maintain a stubborn and private control. And, we have to acknowledge that, especially in the U.S. but also in other countries, there is a very strong theme of rugged individualism, a kind of keep government out of my life religion keeps the NRA, for example, at the forefront of the public debate on gun control and prevents legislation that would require background checks, and limit the size of clips to ten rounds, rather than the 30 or more rounds that have become evidence in several of the mass killings in the U.S.
Humans have a highly developed capacity to ignore, to deny and obviously then to avoid danger signs, especially those that come from bureaucracies that operate in a different country, with researchers whose credentials are not publicly known and recognized. In fact, we are highly adept, through centuries of practice, at poo-pooing such proclamations as this report contains. And add to that a human resistance even to discuss the subject of an impending threat of death and you have ingredients that will make passing legislation to restrict human choices, treading on the sacred ground of individual human freedom, something that frontier people guard with their AK-47, and you have a breeding ground for considerable civil unrest.
We humans have shown limited acceptance of the dangers of global warming and climate change, protesting even the science of its own foreshadowing as debatable for decades. When it comes to individual human lives being numbered in cases of personal cancer from causes that exist around the world, from consumables that come from sources of income for millions and for corporate dividends in the alcohol and juice businesses, as well as in corporate generation of carbon dioxide in the production processes of those profit-seeking and profit-generating companies, the debate will likely be framed as whose lives are more important to protect.
And once again, as we have witnessed so tragically in the tobacco debate, millions of lives have been lost because a monumental lobby of cash operated to deny the dangerous impact of smoking on human health and delayed by decades the implementation of public bans on cigarette smoking. We can anticipate a similar lobby from both the juice and the alcohol production industries rejecting the science that links their commodities to the generation of individual cancer cases. It is, after all, they will argue, their livelihood that is at stake, and the livelihood of those millions of people who work in those industries that will be impacted by restricting production and consumption of their products.
Currently, a similar lobby is vocal and ubiquitous in support of the retention of coal as an energy for the production of electricity, even though we know that coal emissions contribute significantly to our own restricted intake of oxygen necessary for the sustaining of individual lives.
In the long run, if this report has validity, as we calculate it clearly does or it would not have been released, we are facing what amounts to a real-life in real time (NON) simulation game of whose life is worth protecting. And we have never been very successful in holding public debates in a rational and respectful manner about that kind of question.
We can already see the foreshadowing of that kind of public question in our health care systems with limited resources have to be distrubuted to meet an infinite need and having to prioritize that distribution. Of course, we do not make a big news story of those decisions made every day in every cancer clinic in the world. However, we are already intimately engaged in that process.
A single operating theatre and a single cancer surgeon can only operate on a finite number of serious cases, and those that are deemed less serious have to wait. And that interface will only grow into a full blown public consciousness and conflict as the implications of reports like the one issued today by the WHO continue to march across our computer screens, our headlines and our television newscasts.
And each of us has a significant part to play in how it is played out because each of us knows that our grandchildren will be directly impacted by whatever decisions are taken. We can do our part in paving the way for a healthy and rational and respectful debate with accompanying legislation that attempts to balance competing interests in ways that we have not easily found and implemented so far.

WHO: Cancer cases tipped to rise 57% in 20 years in imminent 'human disaster'
By Tim Hume, CNN website, February 4, 2014
CNN) -- Cancer cases are expected to surge 57% worldwide in the next 20 years, an imminent "human disaster" that will require a renewed focus on prevention to combat, according to the World Health Organization.

The World Cancer Report, produced by the WHO's specialized cancer agency, predicts new cancer cases will rise from an estimated 14 million in 2012 to 22 million annually within two decades. Over the same period, cancer deaths are tipped to rise from 8.2 million a year to 13 million annually.

The rising incidence of cancer, brought about by growing, aging populations worldwide, will require a heavier focus on preventive public health policies, said Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

"We cannot treat our way out of the cancer problem," he said. "More commitment to prevention and early detection is desperately needed in order to complement improved treatments and address the alarming rise in cancer burden globally."

The report notes that the rocketing cost of responding to the "cancer burden" -- in 2010, the economic cost of the disease worldwide was estimated at $1.16 trillion -- is hurting the economies of rich countries and beyond the means of poor ones.

The report said about half of all cancers were preventable, and could be avoided if current medical knowledge was acted upon. The disease could be tackled by addressing lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and exercise; adopting screening programs; or, in the case of infection-triggered cancers such as cervical and liver cancers, through vaccines.

Cutting smoking rates would have a significant impact, as lung cancer remained the most commonly diagnosed cancer (1.8 million cases a year, or 13% of total cancer diagnoses) and the deadliest, accounting for about a fifth (1.6 million) of all cancer deaths worldwide.

The report's authors suggested governments take similar legislative approaches to those they had taken against tobacco in attempting to reduce consumption of alcohol and sugary drinks, and in limiting exposure to occupational and environmental carcinogens, including air pollution.

According to the report, the next two most common diagnoses were for breast (1.7 million, 11.9%) and large bowel cancer (1.4 million, 9.7%). Liver (800,000 or 9.1%) and stomach cancer (700,000 or 8.8%) were responsible for the most deaths after lung cancer.

"The rise of cancer worldwide is a major obstacle to human development and well-being," said Wild. "These new figures and projections send a strong signal that immediate action is needed to confront this human disaster, which touches every community worldwide."

The report said the growing cancer burden would disproportionately hit developing countries -- which had the least resources to deal with the problem -- due to their populations growing, living longer and becoming increasingly susceptible to cancers associated with industrialized lifestyles.

More than 60% of the world's cases and about 70% of the world's cancer deaths occurred in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

Governments needed to appreciate that screening and early detection programs were "an investment rather than a cost," said Bernard Stewart, co-editor of the report -- and low-tech approaches had proven successful in some developing countries.

The World Cancer Report, which is published about once every five years, involved a collaboration of around 250 scientists from more than 40 countries. Tuesday is World Cancer Day.

Reflections on the culture around mental illness, including its treatment

Mental health stigma haunts the public discourse in all countries, it would seem. We would rather talk about almost anything else than what to do about mental illness. And we would certainly rather not accept the reality and its implications of the predictions that indicate most families will be affected by mental illness at some time in their history. Individuals do not want to acknowledge their own vulnerability to depression, to distressing thoughts that things will not get better, to their own failures and disappointments and their contribution to those dramas, the story of their family member who was addicted to alcohol, or who attempted or actually accomplished suicide, or who has a mid-life crisis (just another of the euphemisms that we have attached to something that can be life-changing in many ways, both positive and negative.)
It used to be that death was the silent and forbidden subject of polite conversation. And another silent and forbidden subject has been the unexpected pregnancy of a teen  co-ed, many of whom were shipped off to some home somewhat out of town to have the baby. If anyone in the family actually attempted suicide, the good name of the family was tarnished, if not trashed, for generations. Adults who knew the story repeat it whenever something happens that triggers their memory, and so generations of children grow up learning the local history of that family, that includes the man who took his own life, back in .......(fill in the blank with the year of his tragedy).
Rarely, if ever, does the story include how he suffered, how his business or his family life was falling apart, or how he may have sought help from the medical profession, without much more than a prescription for his depression, and another appointment some six months in the future  to ascertain how he is doing. Rarely, too, does the street version of events include his intellectual ability, his creative accomplishments, his un-trumped assistance to many members of that same community.
And rarely, if ever, is there any mention of how the family of the current story-teller attempted to support, guide, walk beside or even comfort the man prior to his eventual death.
It is none of our business, how another person or another family lives, runs the conventional wisdom.
We would only be interfering in something that they have to deal with. If one member of our family were in danger of committing suicide, we would be so ashamed that we certainly would not want someone from across the street or down the street to tell anyone that we were about to suffer a serious tragedy in our family.
What is more, most families are and choose to remain, unaware of any of the signs portending to suicide. We did not see it coming is a phrase that is heard too often following too many incidents in which individuals take their own life. That is because we choose not to anticipate the event. And yet....the signs are growing increasingly large and persistent. Soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder are returning from combat, and taking their lives, according to published reports, mainly because they are not receiving medical, social and spiritual support following their deployments. And when the issue is raised in the parliament, of course, the government shouts about how much money they have thrown at the issue of mental health for veterans, without acknowledging the more significant fact that that money has not found the professionally accredited hires to fill the spots that the money was supposed to fill.  In Canada, for example, the smoke-screen of closing Veterans Affairs offices across the country, and installing veterans affairs officers in Service Canada offices only serves to mask the reality that psychological and psychiatric, as well as spiritual counsellors simply have not been hired to the level that the current population of veterans requires. So all the public noise, is so much sound and fury signifying nothing, again.
We learned today from reports of a study commissioned by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, done by a cardiologist for the foundation, that over half of Ontario residents who have suffered either a heart attack or a stroke fail to adjust their lifestyle to accommodate the changes that would attempt to prevent a second attack. And those who do seem to have significant support from their families to make the needed changes.
If we are failing to adjust to those medical emergencies, image how immune we choose to be and to remain in the face of something that is much less easily documented, and much less easily treated. We all know that a healthy diet and exercise will go a long way to preventing both stroke and heart attacks. We are not educated about the preventive measures that would help ward off mental illness. And what is more, we have a mental health regime that continues to warehouse the most seriously mentally ill among us in places that are governed by rules and regulations that are too often, if not universally, focused on security of staff and not on effective patient treatment and care.
For example, there is a Form 14 in the province of Ontario, used by the psychiatrists who are in charge of admissions to psychiatric wards, that provides the documentation under which the patient will be treated. As a Voluntary Admission, a patient has the right to refuse medications or treatments recommended by the presiding psychiatrist. However, under Form 14, if anyone suspects that a patient is either a danger to others or to him/herself, the psychiatrist can, using the Form 14, a document designed and created by the legal profession, for the protection of the institutions and their staff in which these patients are being treated, can change the designation from Voluntary to Involuntary, and then force the patient to accept whatever treatment is prescribed.
And the trigger incidents under which this Form 14 is applied could be as little as a patient waking to a bad dream and wishing to call his or her spouse, for comfort in the middle of the night and complaining to the night staff when denied. Such complaints whether boisterous or less so, can and do trigger Form 14, for those who have entered under the Voluntary Admission criteria.
Two categories, Voluntary and Involuntary, do not fit the many shades of grey that accompany the various degrees of mental illness, but management, security and the prevention of law suits seem to trump patient care, comfort and family support.
Of course, under particular kinds of distress, different patients will respond to Form 14 changes in their status very differently. As a basic minimum, the public needs to be better educated in the implications of their role, should a member of their family need to be hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, at least in Ontario, and we suspect in many other jurisdictions.
Legal beagles, and their forms, should not be permitted to be the prime source for the drafting of Forms; that process would be much better left to the medical fraternity, whose understanding of their needs, balanced with those of the patient, could easily be transmitted to the legal professionals for their "wording"....
Also, however, if this is the kind of attitude, linked to a highly significant and operative FORM, that prevails among mental health care professionals, then how can we expect the general public to grow a healthy appreciation for the causes, and the preventions of mental illness, as a integral component in our families.
Let's not let this opportunity pass, either, to point a spotlight onto the Canadian culture's addiction to the FORM, as the paper trail for everything we do, in our anal attempt to cover our ass. Whether that FORM, originally based on trees from our forests aplenty morphs into a digital universe, the anal addiction nevertheless remains. And of course, our mere fixation on our need for everyone in every transaction, especially in our public institutions, to commit that transaction to a document (either digital or hard copy) is part of our lack of trust of each other, and our anal anticipation of a law suit. The trail, then, has become, (even if it was not originally intended as such) our defence in the event that our person or our institution is sued.
And we all remember the Hospital for Sick Children case against Susan Nelles, in the death of several babies, decades ago. Restoring trust in our institutions, including our public hospitals, will require much more than our released from our fixation on the FORM, and our obsequious fawning to the legal profession, whose talents are many and varied. The lawyers  must be and remain our agents, not our masters.
It says here that our servitude to such inappropriate masters:

• the legal profession for the mental health profession,
• the economist for the political class and the plutocracy,
• the single parent for the child (she needs the whole village),
• the newspaper for our intelligent comprehension of the meaning behind our news stories,
• the internet for our social connections....
• the "expert" over the generalist, thereby depriving too many situations of the common sense they require
• the academic over the community-based perceptions, and conclusions
• the political class for the governance of the city, province or country

these are all signs of our refusal to accept our individual and our collective responsibility for our lives, and for the culture required to generate and sustain healthy lifestyles. While we must wisely continue not seek the guidance and the knowledge of the specialists, we nevertheless have a huge responsibility to sift and filter that "input" with our own "earned" common sense, based on the deep and profound reflections on our unique experiences. And those reflections require a constantly monitored and sustained pipeline both into and out of our public discourse.
And it is not only our health care budgets that will continue to be strained, to the breaking point if we continue our "pedestalling" of the expert, but also our acceptance and understanding of ourselves and our neighbours, especially when tragedy of whatever kind strikes, as we all know it will.
(The trophy wife will know all to well just how insidious is the process of which I write!)

Hagel: Diplomacy to trump military might...this news trumps the State of Union address

U.S. defense boss seeks to put diplomacy ahead of military might
By Missy Ryan, Reuters, February 1, 2014
(Reuters) - The top U.S. defense official on Saturday underscored the Obama administration's intention to shift the focus of its foreign policy away from military might toward diplomacy.
Speaking at the Munich security conference, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he and Secretary of State John Kerry "have both worked to restore balance to the relationship between American defense and diplomacy".
Hagel, in prepared remarks, stressed that the United States was "moving off a 13-year war footing" as the war in Afghanistan winds down and as Washington seeks to avoid getting involved in additional military conflicts overseas.
Hagel's remarks echo those of President Barack Obama, who in his annual State of the Union address this week said the United States could not rely on its military power alone, promising to send U.S. troops to fight overseas only when "truly necessary".
In recent years, the United States has shown its eagerness to wind down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the military dominated traditionally civilian-led activities such as development aid.
U.S. officials have also sought to avoid becoming involved in new on-the-ground military action in places like Syria and Libya.
"Foreign policy had become too militarized over the last decade or so," a senior U.S. defense official said on condition of anonymity. "It's time for us to be in a supporting role when it comes to the execution of this country's foreign policy."
"The nation's foreign policy should and rightly be led by the State Department, with the Defense Department in full support," the official said.
The State Department is taking the lead on several key foreign priorities for the White House, including the effort to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians and to halt Iran's nuclear programme.
Still, the comments are striking from the head of the powerful, massive U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. military budget, even after cuts imposed amid repeated U.S. budget crises, dwarfs spending for diplomacy and foreign aid.
But the U.S. military has been strained by the long wars that followed the 9/11 attacks.
Washington pulled all troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011. It has also seeking to finalize a security pact with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that would authorize the United States to keep a small force in Afghanistan beyond this year.