You know how occasionally there are candid Q&A's posted on BME? Have you ever wished that Presidential candidates would do that? Well, Michael Badnarik who's running as the Libertarian Presidential candidate just did that over on Slashdot. It's worth a read; here are some quotes to get you started. Please do give it a chance even if you're a “I'm voting for Kerry/Bush” loyalist.
"A lot of Americans don't know that until the 1890s, the government didn't print ballots at all. Voters wrote their own, or used pre-printed ballots provided by the party of their choice. The adoption of the 'Australian ballot' gave the politicians control of what choices were put in front of voters. Personally, I prefer Approval Voting. In this method, each voter can select as many candidates as he likes — he can vote for all the candidates whom he can live with. All of the votes are counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins. The result is that the winner is not necessarily 'the most popular,' but 'the one that the most voters are okay with.'""We could argue all day about whether Bush or Kerry is the "lesser evil." The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq. They both oppose gun rights. They both supported the PATRIOT Act. They both support the war on drugs. They both support confiscatory taxation. They both support ruinously high levels of spending, huge deficits and increasing debt. It's hard to tell them apart on the real issues. All I can tell the 'lesser of two evils' folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil. If you don't like the way things are, how do you change it by voting for more of the same?"
"Ever since the inception of government schooling in the 19th century under Horace Mann, the US has been on a downward trend in literacy, numeracy and science learning. Sometimes that trend is briefly halted, but it always continues."
(more)
While I do believe that Kerry is a “better” choice if we're to choose between two evils, I more strongly believe in what Badnarik is saying about voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil. Given the political similarity between Bush and Kerry, I don't see that either of them is a solution — Americans desperately need the kind of reforms that the LP and other groups are fighting for if it's to prosper through the 21st century. America needs a government that represents its people and their needs.
On to more environmental scaring, but first let me show you what's in the workshop… Watch out for this probably tomorrow in BMEshop. As always, first come, first served.
Remember the plague from the Middle Ages? It killed about 25 million people across Europe. What you may not know is that there have been far more fatal plagues recently. For example, in 1918 there was an influenza (aka the flu) outbreak that killed upwards of 40 million people. It was deadly enough “luckily” that it wiped itself out over the next year. 28% of Americans were infected and almost three quarters of a million died. Statistically this lowered American life expectancy at the time by ten years, but, by the end of 1918 it was gone.
Influenza is usually not so dangerous — this was a unique and mutated variation of the disease, and it hasn't been studied because we simply didn't have the medical knowledge back then to do so. However, a few years ago scientists managed to extract the influenza strain's viral DNA (if you want to really scare yourself, I'll tell you that it was dug up by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and you're welcome to guess what the army wants this virus for), and the University of Washington just got a grant (more) to inject monkeys with the stuff. But here's the punchline.
As I said before, this is an unusually deadly strain of influenza. Because most influenza is really not that dangerous, no special precautions are required to do research on it. Since the University has neither the money nor the legal requirement to have full biocontainment, and there are no plans to do so (although it's certainly still being debated), we have to worry about the potential consequences. The university has gone so far to say as they refuse to have a complete containment for the study.
Yeah, this could turn out really well.
In other news — some of you who are programmers working with H1B folks may already know about this because they've started to show up domestically in codefarms — a new set of strains of highly drug and antibiotic resistant tuberculosis are making the rounds (more). Even today, “normal” TB kills about two million people a year and infects over three times that number. Like the influenza above, it's spread through the air and lungs — this isn't some STD where you've got to trade fluids. All you have to do is breathe near someone who's infected.
The World Health Organization states that their efforts to fight TB are failing. Many areas have simply stopped treating most TB patients, focusing only on the decreasing number that have older strains that can still be treated by drugs.
My crazy advice? Invest heavily in media stocks. If no one can safely leave their homes, broadcast entertainment will become even more profitable than it is now.
Post a Comment