…that may also provide a key to understanding aging.
Faster, please.
Category Archives: Health
You Have To Break Eggs To Make An Omelette
Nurse Bloomberg says that people should have to suffer a bit.
…Mr. Bloomberg also argued the number of pain pills currently being prescribed had even contributed to an uptick in violent crimes outside of pharmacies from robbers looking to steal the drugs.
“You see there’s a lot more hold-ups of pharmacies, people getting held up as they walk out of pharmacies,” he explained. “What are they all about? They’re not trying to steal your shaving cream or toothpaste at the point of a gun. They want these drugs.”.
Yes, and you know what would reduce the number of hold ups? If they could get them legally.
You know who I’d like to see “suffer a bit”? This overprivileged midget fascist.
Starving People For A Green Ideology
…for a green ideology, and corporate greed:
…many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”
This isn’t a market failure. It’s a deliberate distortion of markets through government policy. In some sense, it’s almost as criminally egregious as the behavior of the British during The Hunger in Ireland.
Intermittent Fasting
Is it good for you?
I’ve seen some research indicating that it can offer similar benefits to caloric restriction, in terms of life extension. I know that I do it somewhat on a regular basis. I’ll often go all day without eating, until dinner time. But it’s tough for people who can’t deal with low blood sugar.
Amnesia
…and the self that remains when memory is lost.
This is the concern of cryonicists: what is the nature of identity?
If you don’t have any recollection of your own past, are you still you? If you forget who you are, but have maintained a record of your life, when you go back and read it and refamiliarize yourself, are you “you” again? If so, why wouldn’t anyone who read it become “you”? And if that is “you,” then why not just clone yourself and educate the clone with your memories? Intuitively, it feels like it might be someone else who thinks it’s you, but it’s not really you. Of course, Star-Trek-like teleportation has the same problem — is the person who stepped out of the transporter you, or a physical copy of you with the same memories? Is that continuity sufficient? How does it differ from the you that went to bed last night and woke up this morning (or in my case, the several mes that woke up repeatedly during the night)? Is that the same continuity, or one different in kind?
I’m sure that I’ve told this story before, but years ago, at the California Science Museum in Exposition Park, there was a display on health and medical ethics and it had various questions to poll the visitors. One of them was:
You have an inoperable brain tumor. If a donor became available because their body had failed, would you accept a brain transplant to save your life?
An astonishing number of people said “yes.” Which means they apparently had difficulty with the concept.
Health Care, Housing, And Education
All get worse when government “helps.”
A Briton Is Five Times More Likely
…to die from government health care than an American is from gunshot.
The War On Salt
It’s time to end it.
I continue to try to limit my own sodium intake, because it does seem to affect my blood pressure, but trying to extrapolate from individuals with salt sensitivity to the general population is a fool’s errand based on junk science. Of course, a lot of the power mongers out there, like Mike Bloomberg, are unfortunately fools as well.
Reducing Violence By The Mentally Ill
Note that most of this is not new federal intrusions, but fixing currently broken federal policy.
What We Really Need To Be Talking About
It isn’t gun control. It’s a much tougher problem, from the standpoint of liberty.