If you are not a social authoritarian in love with big government and worry about the personal ramifications for freedom if health care is federalized, here is a chilling idea from the home of socialized medicine - Great Britain. Well, sort of Great Britain, now one of them is in Australia.
Their article shows the slippery slope of choice - basically, if abortions are okay, so is infanticide and if one is not okay, neither is the other. Which means, of course, anything is okay if the 'elites' determine fitness. Eugenics is making a big resurgence in the progressive mindset.
Americans like to fix things. We like to improve and we are convinced the future will be better, a subset of people who want to retreat into the world of the past aside(1), but nothing has changed little despite a century of being criticized like university lectures.
If you are anything like me, and you had a chance to sit around with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, you wouldn't ask fanboy questions like 'will we ever understand the soul?' or 'how much should I make fun of evolutionary psychology surveys about sex?' you would instead lean in conspiratorially and ask, 'what's the best way to get out of a speeding ticket?'
If if you're in media and tired old swine flu sounds too hammy to generate page views and bird flu does not make your audience cry fowl any more, there is good disease news - scientists may have found flu in bats. If bats can get a virus, why can't humans, in an anthropogenic, anthropocentric world?
Well, it isn't necessarily the flu in bats but it is genetic fragments of a flu virus. The precautionary principle says we'd better start vaccinating right now - if it's a slow news week because no singers have died and no white kids have been kidnapped, that is.
It's always good to have a back-up plan and I may have found mine if Science 2.0 doesn't get bought by some
rich media conglomerate in Germany; people gullible enough to believe their organic food is structurally or nutritionally superior and are willing to overpay for it are also likely to overpay for pet food.
In a modern culture that promotes releasing the Id to do as it pleases (but then over-regulating what it can have access too, so no cigarettes, video games or trans-fats) fasting is out of place. Yet people still do it, to the frustration of neo-rationalists and atheist zealots, who note with condescension that it has as little impact on behavior as wearing a football jersey has on the outcome of the Super Bowl.
They're right. About the Super Bowl anyway.
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