七 天 天 氣 預 報@香 港 天 文 台 於 2013 年 12 月 22 日 06 時 00 分 發 出 之 天 氣 報 告 by HKO

七 天 天 氣 預 報

天 氣 概 況 ：
冬 季 季 候 風 會 在 未 來 數 天 持 續 為 華 南 帶 來 寒 冷 的 天 
氣 。 一 股 較 弱 的 季 候 風 補 充 將 於 本 週 中 期 抵 達 沿 岸 
地 區 。 

十 二 月 二 十 二 日 ( 星 期 日 )
風 　 ： 北 至 東 北 風 4 級 ， 離 岸 間 中 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 ， 部 分 地 區 有 煙 霞 ， 天 氣 乾 燥 。 早 上 寒 冷 。 
氣 溫 ： 12 至 17 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 45 至 70 。

十 二 月 二 十 三 日 ( 星 期 一 )
風 　 ： 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 。 早 上 相 當 清 涼 。 
氣 溫 ： 13 至 17 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 60 至 80 。

十 二 月 二 十 四 日 ( 星 期 二 )
風 　 ： 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 。 早 上 相 當 清 涼 。 晚 上 部 分 時 間 多 雲 。 
氣 溫 ： 13 至 17 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 60 至 80 。

十 二 月 二 十 五 日 ( 星 期 三 )
風 　 ： 東 北 風 4 級 ， 間 中 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 。 早 上 部 分 時 間 多 雲 ， 天 氣 相 當 清 涼 。 
氣 溫 ： 14 至 18 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 60 至 80 。

十 二 月 二 十 六 日 ( 星 期 四 )
風 　 ： 北 至 東 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 大 致 天 晴 及 乾 燥 。 早 上 相 當 清 涼 。 
氣 溫 ： 14 至 18 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 55 至 75 。

十 二 月 二 十 七 日 ( 星 期 五 )
風 　 ： 北 風 4 至 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 天 晴 乾 燥 。 早 上 相 當 清 涼 。 
氣 溫 ： 13 至 18 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 50 至 70 。

十 二 月 二 十 八 日 ( 星 期 六 )
風 　 ： 北 至 東 北 風 4 級 ， 間 中 5 級 。 
天 氣 ： 天 晴 乾 燥 。 早 上 寒 冷 。 
氣 溫 ： 12 至 17 度 。
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 50 至 70 。

12 月 21 日 下 午 二 時 北 角  錄 得 之 海 水 溫 度 為 18 度 。
12 月 21 日 上 午 七 時 天 文 台  錄 得 之 土 壤 溫 度 為 ：
0.5 米 19.2 度 ；
1.0 米 21.9 度 。

七 天 天 氣 預 報 插 圖
第 一 天 插 圖 編 號 93 - 冷 
第 二 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 三 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 四 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 五 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 六 天 插 圖 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 
第 七 天 插 圖 編 號 93 - 冷 

天氣報告@香 港 天 文 台 於 2013 年 12 月 22 日 7 時 02 分 發 出 之 天 氣 報 告 by HKO

上 午 7 時 天 文 台 錄 得：
氣 溫 ： 12 度
相 對 濕 度 ： 百 分 之 66 
天 氣 插 圖： 編 號 51 - 間 有 陽 光 

請注意：

火 災 危 險 警 告 為 紅 色 ， 表 示 火 災 危 險 性 極 高 。 
寒 冷 天 氣 警 告 現 正 生 效 ， 天 氣 寒 冷 可 能 影 響 健 康 ， 
市 民 應 小 心 保 暖 。 

  
本 港 其 他 地 區 的 氣 溫 ：

京 士 柏              11 度 ，
黃 竹 坑              12 度 ，
打 鼓 嶺               8 度 ，
流 浮 山               8 度 ，
大 埔                  9 度 ，
沙 田                 10 度 ，
屯 門                 10 度 ，
將 軍 澳              10 度 ，
西 貢                 10 度 ，
長 洲                 10 度 ，
赤 鱲 角              11 度 ，
青 衣                 12 度 ，
荃 灣 可 觀            9 度 ，
荃 灣 城 門 谷        10 度 ，
香 港 公 園           12 度 ，
筲 箕 灣              11 度 ，
九 龍 城              10 度 ，
跑 馬 地              12 度 ，
黃 大 仙              11 度 ，
赤 柱                 12 度 ，
觀 塘                 11 度 ，
深 水 埗              11 度 。

Health Care’s Road to Ruin - NYTimes.com by Elizabeth Rosenthal

HAVING spent the last year reporting for a series of articles on the high cost of American medicine, I’ve heard it all. There was Fred Abrahams, 77, a skier who had surgery on both ankles for arthritis — one in New York for more than $200,000 and one in New Hampshire for less than $40,000. There was Matthew Landman, 41, billed more than $100,000 for antivenin administered in an E.R. after a small rattlesnake bite. There was Robin Miller, a Florida businessman, who needed to buy an implantable defibrillator for his ill brother, who was uninsured; the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, but he couldn’t get a price for a make or a model.

Extreme anecdotes, perhaps. But the series has prompted more than 10,000 comments of outrage and frustration — from patients, doctors, politicians, even hospital and insurance executives.

As of Jan. 1, the Affordable Care Act promises for the first time to deliver the possibility of meaningful health insurance to every American. But where does that leave the United States in terms of affordable care?

Even supporters see Obamacare as a first step on a long quest to bring Americans affordable medicine, with further adjustments, interventions and expansions needed.

There are plenty of interesting ideas being floated to help repair the system, many of which are being used in other countries, where health care spending is often about half of that in the United States. For example, we could strictly regulate prices or preset payment levels, as is currently done for hospital stays under Medicare, the national insurance program for people over 65, or at least establish fair price corridors for procedures and drugs. We could require hospitals and doctors to provide price lists and upfront estimates to allow consumers to make better choices. We could stop paying doctors and hospitals for each service they performed and instead compensate them with a fixed monthly fee for taking care of each patient. We could even make medical school free or far cheaper and then require service afterward.

But the nation is fundamentally handicapped in its quest for cheaper health care: All other developed countries rely on a large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all citizens. That is not politically acceptable here. “A lot of the complexity of the Affordable Care Act arises from the political need in the U.S. to rely on the private market to provide health care access,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, a former adviser to President Obama and president of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care.

With that political backdrop, Obamacare deals only indirectly with high prices. By regulating and mandating insurance plans, it seeks to create a better, more competitive market that will make care from doctors and hospitals cheaper. But it primarily relies on a trickle-down theory of cost containment. The Princeton health economist Uwe E. Reinhardt has called it “a somewhat ugly patch” on “a somewhat ugly system.”

With half a billion dollars spent by medical lobbyists each year, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, our fragmented profit-driven system is effectively insulated from many of the forces that control spending elsewhere. Even Medicare is not allowed to negotiate drug prices for its tens of millions of beneficiaries, and Americans are forbidden by law to re-import medicines made domestically and sold more cheaply abroad.

And so American patients are stuck with bills and treatment dilemmas that seem increasingly Kafkaesque. The hopeful news is that American health care spending has grown at a slower pace over the past four years. While that is partly because of the recession, economists say, many credit the cost-containing forces unleashed by Obamacare with a significant assist. Even at that rate, many models suggest that nearly 25 percent of gross domestic product will be eaten up by health care in 20 years. That is not sustainable.

“It’s like a diet you can’t just stop, because it’s starting to work,” said Michael Chernew, an economist at Harvard Medical School. “And remember, we haven’t even lost weight yet, we’re just gaining weight more slowly.”

Many health economists say we must move away from the so-called fee-for-service model, where doctors and hospitals bill every event, every pill, every procedure, even hourly rental of the operating room. Though insurers try to hold down costs by negotiating discounts or limiting reimbursement, this strategy has limited power because armies of consultants now advise hospitals on what is known as “strategic billing”: Losing money from trauma patients? Hospitals can add on a $10,000-plus “trauma activation fee.” Medicare not paying enough for a broken wrist? Add a separate “casting fee” to the bill.

“People in fee-for-service are very clever — they stay one step ahead of the formulas to maximize revenue,” said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor at the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco.

Given that national or even regional rate-setting is out of the question, most health economists argue that the nation needs a new type of payment model, one where doctors and hospitals earn more by keeping patients healthy with preventive care rather than by prescribing expensive tests.

Such models exist: A number of hospital and doctors groups engage in so-called capitated care, where they are paid an annual fee by an employer or individual for all patient needs and must work within that budget. The Affordable Care Act promotes a strategy focused on accountable care organizations, in which similar networks can earn financial rewards for figuring out how to save money while meeting standards for good care. But such models are still far from the norm in a country where a majority of physicians are in business for themselves and doctors and hospitals bill separately.

The new law includes a number of incentives intended to nudge doctors, hospitals and insurers to join groups and focus more on value, “but we don’t know how well they’re going to work,” said John Holahan, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center.

For example, the law will tax premiums for the most expensive insurance plans to keep luxury health care spending down. And Medicare, through a value-based purchasing program set up by the law, is providing bonuses to doctors and hospitals for meeting quality-care standards. But those are tentative steps. In fact, recent research published in the journal Health Affairs concluded that the magnitude of bonuses now offered to hospitals was too small to change behavior, noting that even supermarket coupons tended to offer benefits worth well over 10 percent of total value.

The Affordable Care Act generally requires patients to be responsible for more of their bills — copays and deductibles — so they will become more price-savvy medical consumers. But the deck is stacked against them in a system where doctors and hospitals are not required or expected to provide upfront pricing. Why not? They should tell and patients should ask. (In France, before a hip replacement on a private patient, doctors must sign a contract that includes a price.)

And policy makers need to address two of the biggest drivers of our inflated national health care bill: the astronomical price of hospitalizations and particularly end-of-life care.

Obamacare plans cap an individual’s annual out-of-pocket spending at $6,350 a year. That (happily) prevents bankruptcy, but it also means that patients will still not be very discerning shoppers when it comes to major hospitalizations, since — in the United States — they’ve quite likely surpassed their out of pocket maximum by the time they’ve been formally admitted.

On the private side, some companies and employee health plans are experimenting with new payment models to limit these large bills. They may follow Medicare, which offers hospitals bundled payments for given procedures, or try a technique known as reference pricing, in which they pick a rate they think is fair for a procedure — say $32,000 for a knee replacement, all-inclusive. If a patient wants to go to a hospital with higher fees, the difference comes out of his pocket.

To rein in price increases, companies and insurers have begun offering patients narrower networks, already a major gripe about many Obamacare plans.

And as choices narrow while prices rise, I sense that many patients are no longer so devoted to a market-based health care system. Barbara Felton, 86, was “shocked” when she saw her $12,000 itemized hospital bill for a recent brief stay to repair a fractured femur in Pocatello, Idaho. “I’ve never been in favor of a single payer before, but now I am,” she said, referring to a government-run health system.

The perfect recipe for containing medical costs remains to be written and must be tweaked thoughtfully. After all, the American health care system is a major part of the economy. As Dr. Blumenthal, the former Obama adviser, put it: “If you put our health care system on an island and floated it out into the Atlantic it would have the fifth-largest G.D.P. in the world. It’s like saying you have to change the economy of France.”

But after a year spent hearing from hundreds of patients like Mr. Abrahams, Mr. Landman and Mr. Miller, I know, too, that reforming the nation’s $2.9 trillion health system is urgent, and will not be accomplished with delicate maneuvers at the margins. There are many further interventions that we know will help contain costs and rein in prices. And we’d better start making choices fast.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/sunday-review/health-cares-road-to-ruin.html?ref=elisabethrosenthal&pagewanted=print

癌症只是慢性病（下） by 嚴浩

我曾經一再的說，希望服用布緯食療的人一定要自己看我的書，因為書中有很多珍貴的經驗分享，這位癌症專家也這樣說：「榜樣療法有利於康復。」意即參考成功的經驗有利康復。專家還說：「患者應相互傳遞正能量。」在康復過程中，正能量永遠是主導思想，也不能孤獨一人，特別是前三個月。過了三個月，一半人心理開始穩定，「有很多方法可以解除心理危機，交友、聊天、購物等等，但是不能孤獨一個人。」


「病的形成是一個慢的過程，病的康復也是一個慢的過程，一定要有信念好好的活下去，千萬不能操之過急。」 心理因素常決定治療成敗，專家強調四點：一、癌症不是死亡，癌症只是慢性病。二、對自己放寬一點，節奏放慢一點。三、尋找快樂，學會享受。四、放低標準，釋放壓力。


專家還說：「男性得腫瘤多是生活方式不好，女性多是自我要求太高。」這也是我在與讀者們互動的這幾年中得出的一個概念。我再一次強調，嚴浩不是醫生，我在《半畝田》中所寫的養生文章只是一再提醒大家要防患於未然，如果大家因為跟隨我提倡的食療法而健康恢復了，也因為大家做到了昨天上篇說的三點：大部分的病與飲食、生活方式、和心理有關，一個人如果把這三點都照顧到了就健康了，少一樣不可，醫生是你自己。也要注意一個時間因素，再把以上的三點照顧到以後，給身體最少四個月時間恢復自癒功能，在有好轉跡象的時候更不可放鬆，這三點要成為今後生活的指南。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18561095&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131222

窩 囊 by 李碧華

小奴才上京面聖述職，膽怯勢孤力弱，語言偽術無補於事，急召三個小小奴才壯膽、解畫、補充──總之正襟危坐寫筆記，徒具小學雞姿態而已，有點窩囊。而這樣的人管治香港，得花公帑飼養又不能一人一票挑選能者，香港人倒最窩囊了。


「窩囊」不知如何成立？本來「窩」也不算差：窩心、安樂窩、窩窩頭（小吃），窩蛋牛肉飯，不過遇上「囊」就委屈了，煩悶又無能，怯懦加鵪鶉。


「今日受了領導一頓窩囊氣，沒地方發洩，回來一定找些人出氣不可！」「他的一生就這樣窩窩囊囊混過去了，給他機會也不懂把握，先天不足，醫好也嘥藥費。」


該出口時不出口，該出手時不出手，該挺身時不挺身，該爭取時不爭取，該買不買，該賣不賣……「該」不是要害，關鍵在「不」──有些人永遠不敢，或者不想。窩囊的好處是「無功無過，平安大吉」。


這類人北方喚作「窩囊肺」，比如老舍作品中。「連XX都這樣看不起咱們，再低着頭裝窩囊肺，世界上恐怕就沒一個人同情咱們，看得起咱們。」──何以用「肺」？辭典上「窩囊廢」同義，但更傳神。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18561089&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131222

天工開物 by 陶傑

中文不是現代理性的語言，尤其不可以用作普世的法律語言，因為中文精長於感性，而愚拙於知性。中文是方塊字，其字義與繪畫一樣，着重於畫面外延伸的無限聯想。


譬如「雞聲茅店月，人跡板橋霜」，就是靠畫面外的聯想。午夜月色下，朦朧一聲雞叫，就感覺到破曉將近了。板橋上一層薄霜，有一行淺淺的足印，時間和季節之外，還有一層薄薄的離愁。這一切，要用聯想來領會：聲音、色彩、冷暖，短短十字，都有豐盛的情境，還有情境外的人文精神。


如果換成英文，要講主語、動詞、時態，一板一眼，一螺旋一鐵釘，都須交代清楚。但是，藝術不一定要交代清楚，意境更不可能清楚。因此中文是全世界第一流的詩情語言，不是第一等的法理語言。


以中文為母語的人，在此一語意環境生長，思維則成為一種模式。中文用在詩詞，可以令生活歡欣，可以令人生透澈，可以令心境昇華。但是，中文用於政治，即可以延伸許多動機的揣測，以及陰謀的聯想。


中國人社會的種種政治迫害，中國語文的思維是一種刀斧工具。因為一切在一個「意」字。「意」往往不必細表而詳析，「意」是一種感覺，「意」不必證據和表徵。「意會」不是用來傳導美感的，而是暗生殺機。


中國語文裏人文的藝術生活，是士大夫精英創造傳承的；但中國語文裏政治的刀斧刑械，卻在帝皇的極權想像之中。「千古逆賊」與「雞聲茅店月」明明是兩樣事情，但聯想的性質相同。「千古逆賊」的討伐在公審時與中國農民愚眾的聯想搭上線，而「雞聲茅店月」的意境只在書房裏士大夫精英的線裝書裏神傳。當中國人自我吞噬，在毀劫之後，屠滅了士大夫精英，只剩下皇權和愚眾，則中國語文亦一片白森森的刀斧矛戟，用以奴役，用以戮殺，而功能別無其他。


香港的基本法，是這個中國大世代的產物。雖然眾「草委」當年很吃力地想體現「法治」，而且港方的一些「草委」，也一心想用這本小冊保障英式的法治，但由於「基本法」由中國人以中文寫作，此一目標，猶如將一隻小母雞跟一隻公白鴿媾接，絕對生不出一隻能飛上天的老鷹來。


這一點，關乎天工物種，一切無法「解釋」，也無以「修改」。

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Source: http://hkm.appledaily.com/detail.php?guid=18561085&category_guid=vice&sup_id=12187389&category=daily&issue=20131222