Ethic Soup

Animal Rights Donations Up: Mickey Rourke Thanks His Dogs

 

This is an UP article -- Donations to animal rights groups are up even as the economy is plummeting and Comeback King Mickey Rourke has gotten himself up again, winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor, thanking his dogs in his acceptance speech.

Rourke's 16-year-old Chihuahua-terrier mix, Loki, is pictured  with him above. But Mickey thanked all of his dogs.

 "The ones that are here, the ones that aren't here anymore because sometimes when a man's alone, that's all you got is your dog," he said  "And they've meant the world to me."

At first the live audience laughed when Rourke said "I'd like to thank all my dogs," thinking he was being sarcastic, suggestive of how everyone at awards' ceremonies always thanks everyone under the sun -- including their manicurist. But the audience quickly recognized the sincerity of his emotional outpouring. Everyone knew bad-boy Mickey Rourke had been through hell and back with his drug problems and countless run-ins with police.

When a reporter at the Golden Globes mentioned that he had been out of the business for ten years, Rourke responded, "More like 14 years ago, if you want to be honest. Ten (years) sounds easy."

HEARTFELT EXPRESSION OF LOVE TO HIS DOGS

His thank you to his dogs  was a heartfelt and expression of his love and gratitude to his pets...coming from a macho man to a live TV audience of millions around the world! Whether he was hitting bottom or on the top, his dogs were his best friends and companions.

Deaths of Ten Ethical Heroes -- 2008

    

The following ten persons are Ethic Soup heroes who died in 2008. They lived their lives in ways that helped a great many people. They tried to do the right thing.

                                                    

      Mildred Loving, with husband Richard P. Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling, died at her home in rural Milford. She was 68.

  Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from the murderous Khmer Rouge in 1979 was the subject of the film "The Killing Fields." He died of pancreatic cancer, three months after diagnosis. He was 65.

                                                                                                                                                                                  

Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television whose screenplay for "Judgment at Nuremberg" won the 1961 Academy Award (pictured with Lee Remick) died at age 80.

 

W. Mark Felt, claimed he was "Deep Throat," when he was second-in-command of the FBI in the early 1970s, the long-anonymous source  who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate coverup to The Washington Post. He died at age 91.

Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oral historian, became famous for allowing thousands of ordinary people tell their own stories about how they got through the Great Depression, WWII and their own work days --telling what they thought about everything from race to dying. He died in Chicago at age 96.

 

Paul Newman, actor and philanthropist, was a screen legend, having acted in some 65 movies over more than 50 years. Newman opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepeneur with a line of foods on supermarket shelves around the world. He gave more than $220 million to others.   He died at age 83 after battling cancer.  (See Ethic Soup's article on Paul Newman here.)

 

 

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author won the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature. He died at age 89. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment and exile.

 

Randy Pausch, former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "Last Lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an international sensation and a best-selling book. He died at age 47.

                                                                                                                                                          

George Carlin, the always irreverant comedian, and heir to Lenny Bruce, gave voice to an indignant counterculture and assaulted the barricades of censorship. Died at age 71 at his home in Venice, Calif. 

 

Barbara Seaman, writer and activist, made a career of speaking up for women trying to ensure that their health concerns were taken seriously which led to patient's rights reforms. She died at home in New York City at age 73.

Giant Lobster's Fate Tied to Food Bank Donations

 Illus. by Sharon McEachern  

                                                                                           

This story is an everyday lesson in ethics.

Sometimes people show their love and compassion for animals more than people. But this time Pete Chevalier, owner of Gardner's Seafood in Wickford, R.I., isn't going to let that happen. 

Pete has an approx. 65-year-old lobster in his seafood tanks that weighs a whopping 20.6 pounds.  And he's tied the fate of the lobster, named "Wickford Willie," to whether or not people donate to the local food bank. If they will donate $2,500 to the food bank, then Pete promises he will let Willie go. If they don't come through and help hungry people, "a very important cause in the heart of a very cold winter,"  then Pete says he will boil Willie alive.

BOIL WILLIE ALIVE

Jeez! Such a threat isn't really necessary, is it?

Maybe not. But it is true that people often care for animals more than people. For example, a few years ago, there was a story of a woman jogging in southern California who was killed by a mountain lion. The fund for the slain cougar's orphaned pups received more donations than the fund for the woman's orphaned children. (Read more here.)

So, I think Pete Chevalier is very clever and putting into practice some everyday ethics.

Everyday Ethics: Champions and Losers

 

What are some everyday events that reveal a person's personal ethics? I'm talking about both major news stories and smaller events. The following are some stories about the ethics of losers, others about the ethics of everyday heroes.

                                         Wayward son --

A man wearing a white "What Would Jesus Do?" T-shirt pumped $10 worth of fuel in his 1994   Buick and left without paying. Appears that in the wake of high gasoline prices, Jesus quietly revised some of his teachings.

 

                              Father of the year --

If you're a good father what do you do when caught with a photo of a naked woman on your laptop? You throw your own son under the bus, if you're like former Ohio State Rep. Matthew Barrett. The state rep. was making a presentation to a high school government class when his laptop projected the naughty image onto the screen. He said he had no idea where that photo came from, didn't know anything about it. He told investigators he suspected it was the work of this 12-year-old son. After Barrett resigned, months later, he finally admitted that the woman was someone he knew who had e-mailed him the photo. Oh yes, it was at his request. Thanks so very much, Pop!

Hip! Hip! Hooray! --

A dispatcher for the Boston Fire Department, 53-year-old Frank Sullivan was riding Boston's Orange Subway Line when he saw a student being beaten for his iPod. Unlike his fellow riders, Sullivan tackled the 22-year-old attacker as he tried to escape on the escalator leading out of the station. Before the attack, Sullivan was reading Rabbi Harold Kushner's book "Practice Random Acts of Kindness. "Why read the book if you're not going to do it?" said Sullivan, the father of two. 

Price-Gouging Preemie Drug: FTC Sues Pharma Ovation

  

When it comes to saving a baby's life, price is no object.  Ovation Pharmaceuticals banked on that --literally.

The Federal Trade Commission has sued the drug maker for alleged price-gouging after Ovation cornered the market on two life-saving drugs for premature babies -- and then inflated the price by 1,300 percent.

In what the FTC calls "monopoly prices" and "unlawfully obtained profits," the drug called Indocin was jacked up in price from $36 to $500 per vial. How do you spell G-R-E-E-D?

The drug is for preemies with life-threatening heart defects. It repairs a heart blood vessel defect that occurs in some preterm-infants that can lead to congestive heart failure. For decades Indocin had been the treatment of choice for some 30,000 preemies born annually with this potentially fatal heart problem. Ovation's drugs are the only alternative to risky surgery for "patent ductus arteriosus" in which a blood vessel connecting two heart arteries fails to close," reports efluxmedia.com .

PRICE-GOUGING GREED

"Just when I thought I could not take any more outrageous greed!" said Dr.Toni Brayer in her blog Everything Health, voicing what so many feel today. "This type of price gouging and greed needs to be halted in its tracks. I can't imagine what defense Ovation will propose. It looks pretty clear that they purchased their only competitor and blackmailed the medical community into paying the price."

Don't Kill Me Doctor: Wash Your Hands!

 

"Wash your hands or else!"

It's not a threat from Mom. It's a warning by hospitals to doctors. The "or else" means you could get sacked if you don't clean up your act.

It's hard to believe. The chances are only 50-50 that the doctor treating you in the hospital, even when performing your surgery, has washed his hands. The odds are the same as flipping a coin. Actually it's worse than that. According to the National Quality Forum, hand-washing compliance rates at hospitals are generally less than 50 percent.

Methicillin-resistant staph aureus, or MRSA, is the strain of a once-innocuous staph infection that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics and kills more people every year in the U.S. than the AIDS virus and in the majority of cases is contracted in hospitals, reports the Sacramento (CA) Bee.

Knowing this fact, you may be more willing to challenge your doctor and ask her if she has washed her hands before she touches you. That's exactly what some hospitals are asking patients to do.

HIDDEN CAMERAS WATCH DOCTORS

And that's not all that hospitals are doing in desperation. The problem is so great that hospitals are threatening to fire physicians found lax in washing their hands. Some medical centers are measuring their liquid soaps and using hidden cameras to see if physicians are really washing their hands.

Hospitals should be safe places to go, not a place where you go in and then die from something other than what you came in with.

German Coffee Shop Chain Uses Nazi Slogan Ads

 "Jedem den Seinen" Gate at Nazi Buchenwald Concentration Camp 

 

Coffee stories have been chasing me for days. News stories about the health dangers of caffeine and Ethic Soup has reported on them. And now this...

This one, this coffee story has chased me in my nightmares. The holocaust just won't go away.

A German coffee roaster with a chain of coffee shops, Hamburg-based Tschibo, has had a nation-wide advertising campaign jointly with Esso petrol stations in Germany. (Esso is the international trade name for ExxonMobil.)  It used the phrase "Jedem den Seinen" to advertise its coffee varieties. The English translation of the slogan is "To each their own." However after complaint the company has just this week pulled its ad campaign and recalled some 700 posters from the gas stations where they hung, featuring the slogan, reports Jewish and Israel News.

"Jedem den Seinen" was the phrase which hung over the main gate at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

This news makes me sick...

Although the literal translation is "To each their own," figuratively it means "Everyone gets what he deserves."

Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz and others; however, more than 56,000 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and prisoners-of-war were starved or worked to death in the camp, reports the London Telegraph.

Vanderbilt Research: Coffee-Growers Pay, Researcher Distorts?

   

I have no proof, not of intentional lying. But there is plenty of proof that a quote attributed to Vanderbilt University's Dr. Peter R. Martin, by over 100 newspapers yesterday, is FALSE and could prove harmful to people who believe him!

 Dr. "Pants-on-Fire" Martin is Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, and the Director of the Institute of Coffee Studies located within the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Yes, he is an educated man. Yes, he's a psychiatrist with an M.D. degree. Yes, he has taught future doctors. 

And yet, this is what he said : "Even though at one time coffee was considered harmful to your health, at this point there is no compelling research to indicate that, in fact, is true." (For just one source, see New York Daily News.)

WRONG! CAFFEINE CAN BE HARMFUL

His comment -- which was wrong -- was in response to the HealthSaver Caffeinated Cities Survey (naming which U.S. cities drink the most cups of caffeine-filled coffee). Meant to highlight the "health" benefits of caffeine, this clever, well-publicized survey got lots of news media coverage. It seemed like every newspaper and television station in the country used this story yesterday, talking about where their city came in the rankings. I "Googled " the topic and read many of the articles. Sadly none of the articles that I read questioned either the survey motivation, results, or Dr. Peter R. Martin's statement.

Just to be perfectly clear.There continues to be a great deal of scientific evidence that caffeine can be deleterious to your health. In fact, Ethic Soup posted an article on Caffeine Facts recently listing some of this evidence. Additionally, there has been a lot of news articles on the Miller-Coors  "alcopop" Sparks  which contained caffeine until forced off the market by a coalition of state attorneys general. There is so much concern about caffeine that last week a new product, D+Caf test strips was released which in 30-seconds tests the cup of coffee you ordered to make certain decaf is really decaf.

Now why would Dr. Martin make a false statement about there being no compelling research indicating that caffeinated coffee is harmful to your health?

Nature Restores the Mind : Just a Walk in the Park

            "My Backyard" is by Artist Leung Grace, a Texas second-grader. 

When someone tells you to "take a hike" it is truly in your best interest to do so.

Even if the temperature has dropped below freezing in winter you will still benefit more from getting outdoors and being with nature for a while than staying warm inside, working in your cubicle.

Spending time in nature is more beneficial for mental processes in many ways than being in urban environments, according to a new study reported in Psychological Science.

"Interacting with nature can have similar effects as meditating," said Marc Berman chief researcher of the University of Michigan psychology research team. As quoted in NewsMax: "People don't have to enjoy the walk to get the benefits. We found the same benefits when it was 80 degrees and sunny over the summer as when the temperatures dropped to 25 degrees in January."

NATURE IMPROVES MEMORY & ATTENTION

What benefits? Well, memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. There are even cognitive benefits just viewing pictures of nature!

Caffeine Test Strips: Is Your Decaf Really Decaf?

Do you trust your coffee barista?

Oh, you can trust him to charge you an arm and two legs for your cuppa joe. But if you ask for your java decaffeinated, do you trust that's what you'll get? Studies show that somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of supposedly decaffeinated coffee and tea is actually fairly high in caffeine, says MIT's Technology Review.

How can you be sure? Some java junkies claim that it's easy to tell the difference -- decaf tastes horrible, they say.

The good news is that there's a new test kit that can help you tell the difference between high octane and unleaded java. A strip of paper soaks up your joe from a sample and after about 30 seconds antibodies in the strip produce colored lines should it contain caffeine.