Listen, My Children...

First, do no harm -- except when you want to

This story is a bit distressing -- doctors urging the government to let them kill (actively, not just "let die") babies judged too disabled to be worth letting live.  My thoughts line up with these:

Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said: "Euthanasia for disabled newborns tells society that being born disabled is a bad thing. If we introduced euthanasia for certain conditions, it would tell adults with those conditions that they are worth less than other members of society."

I agree; a member of my future extended family -- on each side -- are handicapped in ways many people would kill them over, nowadays, but they are both delightful people and I definitely don't think the world would be better off if they were dead. 

Something goes wrong? Ban it!

Gotta love the Floridian's response to The Sun's story of drug tests gone horribly wrong:

These drug trials should be abolished. Mr Modi is very lucky to be alive and this should be a lesson to the drug companies and their representatives.

Yes, that's it!  Something might go wrong, so it's better not to make any new drugs, ever!  (I assume she's not suggesting that they simply don't test the drugs they release.)  Much more sensible are the people who point out that it's thanks to animal testing that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.  But hey, Ms. Florida would probably protest animal testing as well.  It's the American Way.

Intelligent Design

Ha! Lileks goes in for intelligent design.  Quick!  Everyone misinterpret what he says and call him a young-earth anti-evolution science-fearing creationist idiot!

Cargo Inspection

People are always complaining about the low rate of cargo inspection. 

Some people I know in Houston acted like real Texans: instead of complaining, they decided to do something about it.  In the works is a technology that would allow all the big box cargo to be scanned without the current time-consuming process that makes universal scanning impractical. 

Something to keep your eyes on.

Lessons in Common Sense

Those who know me in person know I have very little common sense. At one point I put up daily notes for the roommates of things I'd learned that day that anyone with a moderate amount of common sense would know automatically. My favorite of those was, "do not wear a low-cut top when it's snowing."

Lesson for today? When you're cleaning house, and you seriously slice your thumb open on the toaster, do something about it before picking up the rag soaked in lemon-scented bleach.

Katrina Cough

"Katrina cough," eh? I've had that -- dubbed it Madras bronchitis. Lasted four years. May have had lasting damage. Sure hope these people get help. My suggestion? If it doesn't go away after four years, try the medicine that sounds like a Sci-Fi series: Tessalon Pearl.

My Scientology

Apparently, the drug-abuse class we had at my school in London must have been run by Scientologists.  I don't remember the name of the program, but it did include such things -- undisputed by the largely drug-using students -- as saying that pot can give you the munchies, that you can get acid flashbacks years after the fact, that huge amounts of caffeine can kill you (especially in things like taking a handful of caffeine pills, or if you have a weak heart), etc.  But now I find out all those things are wrong and just the product of warped Scientology minds!  Who'd'a thought?

(Somewhat more seriously, I strongly dispute San Francisco's claim that "Authorizing ex-addicts to teach drug prevention in schools may tacitly reinforce student perceptions that drug use really isn't risky" -- at least when you're talking to me, you'll have more luck in getting me not to do something if you can tell me how it destroyed your life and killed off half your friends, than if you tell me you have no experience of it yourself but you hear it's pretty nasty.  Maybe Californian kids are different, and will hear "it destroyed my life and killed off half my friends" as "it's really not risky," but I somehow doubt it.)

(off topic: I generally pick Today over GMA (or whatever it is CBS has), but I agree that Diane Sawyer is more human and realistic and calming and like the middle-aged women I hang out with.  She's also aging like a normal person, while Katie Couric's starting to look a little crazed.  So what?  I still watch Today.)

Stem Cell Research

Very cool.

Reveal Codes

I hate Microsoft Word so much. I'd only use Word Perfect (where they understand that some users are -- gasp! -- intelligent enough to be able to wonder what the *&(^@$(*&^ is going on with the result of what should have been a very easy cut and paste, to pull up and understand the underlying formatting, and to delete and alter it until they get their desired outcome), except that nobody else has the capability to read Word Perfect documents and (for some unknown reason) Word Perfect documents saved as MSWord format, even if they show up fine when opened in MSWord on my computer, have a much greater chance of coming through email as nonsense than original MSWord documents created on my computer and then emailed (although even they often seem to be severely mauled in transmission).

I know everyone else has a hit on half the population of that part of Seattle already, so it wouldn't make a difference if I joined the boat, but that's the only reason I'm not. (Well, that, and not having found an email client, besides Outlook Express, that will do what I want -- that is, access multiple hotmail accounts -- although even that's being cut off for new users.)

Conflict of Interest

I wonder... what do super-environmentalists suggest to protect the being-eaten population when one endangered species is killing off another? Or when one non-endangered species is multiplying like anything and threatening the population of other non-endangere species? Or when a non-endangered species (besides humans) is killing off an endangered species? (I know what they suggest we don't do -- kill the offending stronger species, especially by nasty methods -- but what positive action do they think should be taken? Any?)

I wonder if the Kid Brother got any flak from his surprisingly leftist and amusingly uninformed friends (I see myself at that age....) over his Eagle Scout project, protecting the very endangered Atwaters Prairie Chicken by cutting down a whole lot of trees. Because he was cutting down trees -- that's bad! I'll have to ask him...