Word: flu
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...particularly good at prevention. The tack, usually, is to patch people up as they get sick, rather than keeping them from falling ill to start. But no Band-Aid is sufficient to handle a lethal pandemic, which some experts say is inevitable - if not imminent. Whether it's bird flu or some other deadly knock-out germ that eventually sweeps through the country, scientists and public-health researchers are trying to prepare for it now to ensure that everyone has a better chance of survival...
...rather, a bad influenza. And it isn't just the "fat flu" you can catch from friends. Good friends enable all manner of bad habits, even when they're doing nothing at all. Around friends, we slip back into regional accents we've spent years trying to exorcise--redneck recidivism--or embroider our speech with the kind of epic profanity more common to 19th century lobstermen. (That's the bad habit I revert to around my friends, all of whom swear like Friars Club roastmasters...
...study claims that friends supersede spouses as carriers of the fat flu, but wedding vows can still be a vector. Researchers say our risk of obesity increases 37% if our spouses are overweight (vs. 57% for overweight friends and 40% for overweight siblings...
Ordinarily, the concept of greed isn't very useful in trying to understand the economy. We are all greedy. We'd all like more. The magic of capitalism turns our individual greed into general prosperity. But maybe an especially virulent strain of greed is spreading, something like bird flu. Maybe this is a greed so profound that it blinds its victims to their obvious self-interest. Maybe this greed can turn the brightest men into fools. It's hard to think of any other explanation...
...IMAGE MANY AMERICANS have of dovish former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa is unfortunate: it's of him cradling a flu-stricken George H.W. Bush in 1992 after the President vomited on him during a dinner. Yet the former Foreign Minister advised policymakers in boosting Japan's economy after World War II; helped plan a bailout of Japan's failed banking system in the '90s; and as the country's leader for two years, sought to restore ties with wartime enemies in Asia. In 1992 he was the first Japanese PM to acknowledge the role of Japanese soldiers in forcing...