Mary, I've heard of some of the health stuff you've mentioned, the diet of eskimos in particular. On top of that, the things that are known as causes of particular health problems aren't necesarily present in people who get those problems, if you look at it in reverse. Most heart attacks happen on monday mornings. How one feels about their job is a main indicator of health, generally.

   Whenever I need a fairly safe topic I advocate good work.

I got to call people lazy and stupid in my workplace parody of philosophical conservativism, which was great fun. When I was inducted as a liberal I had to pledge not to say things like that, before they gave me my card to carry. I have a geat sympathy with McGrath's opinions, admire his calm voice.

   It's easy to call the poor lazy and stupid, easy to find their abuses of help, and suppose it justifies everything. They have everything, those poor people. There is no free brunch. Laziness is sometimes a stunted imagination, in people who can't see things working out for them, can't imagine it. You don't have to like them to see that things get out of balance, and one needn't redistribute wealth beyond applying existing law to white collar abuse, to make a whopping difference. What is a rich person stealing compared to a poor one? We go light on it, they seem more like us than those scummy poor.

   I think if poverty were not so associated with such shame and taken for an outward sign of personal worth, if there was a respectable model of livable poverty, the wealthy might not be so terrified of losing their money that they horde and and scrimp and steal in feverish terror. And the poor might not feel so personally defeated they often don't know how to try. These are psycological factors apart from the fact that the poor pay more for everything, are kept "unlucky" systematically.

That "thinning the herd business". I've never seen a variant of that idea that wasn't gobbledygook. Whatever.