Cynical Activities - R
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RACE
You won't be surprised to hear this by now, but your ethnic background is bad for you no matter what it is. If you're white, for example, you're much more likely than African-Americans to die while being treated in Veterans Affairs hospitals, or to get osteoporosis and bladder cancer or melanoma, as well as to commit suicide (if you're a white male) and to recover less well mentally from coronary artery disease. If you're African-American, on the other hand, you're at much greater risk than whites of contracting or dying from breast and other cancers, hypertension, diabetes, childhood asthma, or (if you're a woman) fatal complications in pregnancy, as well as receiving inferior medical treatment for conditions ranging from glaucoma to heart attacks. Hispanics are 20 percent more likely than blacks or whites to die from injuries at work, 50 percent more likely than whites to die of diabetes, and only half as likely to have a high school education; they receive worse care when they get AIDS, and are at greater risk of having undiagnosed glaucoma. Native Americans have a higher incidence of smoking and of driving without seat belts, as well as having limited access to health care and suffering disproportionately from poor health, obesity, lack of exercise, and diabetes, which afflicts the Pima Indians in Arizona more than any other group
in the world. Asian-Americans have the highest rate of late HIV intervention of any ethnic group, are three to five times as likely as whites to get liver cancer, are five times as likely (at least in the case of Vietnamese women) to get cervical cancer, and die of heart attacks in unusual numbers on the fourth day of each month, stressed by the fact that the words for "four" and "death" are linguistically very similar in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese. The only good news is that if you're Asian-American, this is your kind of book: you're more likely than whites to be pessimistic about life. |
RAIN
If you thought you could escape the perils of the SUN by living somewhere nice and rainy, you were wrong. More than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are poured into the atmosphere each year as a result of burning fossil fuels; a large proportion of these compounds returns to the earth in the form of acid rain, which injures trees, kills off fish in lakes and streams, damages buildings, reduces visibility, and produces lung disorders such as asthma and bronchitis. |
REFEREE, BEING A
In the past decade, hundreds of referees and other sports officials have been physically assaulted, or have had their cars vandalized or their pets attacked, by players, coaches, and fans upset about their decisions during games. Yelling insults about the ref's mother is one thing, but you have to worry about any fan who has enough dedication to find out where his hamster lives. |
REFRIGERATORS, EMPTY
Elderly people with empty refrigerators are more likely to be admitted to hospital than elderly people whose refrigerators are not empty. Remember, somebody paid for this study. You or I could have told them for free that people who can't afford food are more likely to get sick, and then they could have used the funding to fill up those refrigerators. |
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