“If they can find time for feminist theory, they can find time for Edmund Burke.”
A “Breakthrough” In Appetite Suppression
Via Futurepundit:
The brain injection part isn’t exactly appealing. But surely some appetite-cutting compounds will be able to travel via the blood. After all, appetite is influenced by the hormone ghrelin (secreted epsilon cells of the pancreas and P/D1 cells of the stomach) and leptin (secreted by adipose tissues). So the blood does contain compounds that make it into the brain.
While we are living in an era with a high prevalence of obesity we are nearing the end of that era. 20 years from now I expect obesity to be rare in developed countries as drugs that suppress appetite hit the market.
So, if they can get around the “brain injection” part, sounds great. Right?
Not to me.
Let’s start with the fact that it is not our appetites, per se, that make us obese. Throughout history, humans with our appetites have not been, for the most part, obese.
It is a combination of our appetites with a body inherited by evolution to resist losing weight in times of scarcity, and plentiful high-glycemic carbohydrates unavailable to our pre-agricultural ancestors, and a lack of need to go running miles a day with a heavy load to bring home food. We are obese because food that is bad for us is cheap, we don’t exercise much any more because we have figured out how to do a living at a desk, and our bodies haven’t caught up.
But you know what?
I like my appetites. I think that appetites are one of the things that make us human. I like digging into a juicy filet mignon, a succulent lobster dipped in butter, an artichoke. I love the taste (and smell) of fresh bread coming out of the oven.
And you know what else? I really like engaging various of my bodily parts with those of another person of the opposite sex, even though it makes no sense, from an intellectual standpoint. I even like thinking about it, or looking at pictures of other people doing it (though not anywhere near as much as actually doing it). That’s an appetite, too. And one that decreases with age, but I haven’t noticed that it’s made me (or I imagine many others) any happier. And (at least from the literature) the age-related decrease seems to be increased in females, which doesn’t in any way enhance the happiness of many males for whom the decrease has been less, particularly when they are the only females available, sans adultery. That seems like a more worthy problem to attack than “reducing appetite.”
Yes, I know that some transhumanists (like Hans Moravec) want to be a robot. This has been the platonic ideal going back at least to…well…Plato. You know, the body distracts us from the higher values of the intellect…bla, bla, bla.
But does the intellect really make life worth living? The platonists, the transhumanists, would like to persuade us that it does, that properly implemented, the pleasures of the intellect will vastly exceed the base carnal pleasures of this rotting form.
Well, maybe. But even though I’m from Michigan, my darling Patricia is from Missouri. Show us.
Then, maybe.
But mere showing won’t be enough of course. We’d have to have a personal demonstration, in which thinking about…whatever…beats an orgasm, or even biting into a delicious meal.
Maybe suppressing appetites is the future, but I hope not, at least for the immediate future. I’d like to think that there are better redesigns of the body to prevent obesity. Because I like my appetite for food, and my appetite for other things, and if this is where technology is taking us, sign me…not up.
Of course, with the current administration, which clearly wants to put the government in charge of our health care, and which will be looking for ways to reduce the cost of such, and obesity being viewed as one of the primary causes of health-care costs, don’t expect that it will merely pay for appetite suppressants, brain injected or otherwise.
Expect them to be compulsory.
Everything You Know About Fascism
…is wrong.
Go take the quiz. A lot of interesting discussion in comments.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is an amusing comment, in response to a troll (who as usual, hasn’t really read the book):
Wheeler.. you’re reducing Voxiversity to an online version of a public school experience.
What a shock.
Lacking A Sense Of Irony
A Canadian government censor censors herself:
Any guest who pulls such a stunt deserves to be exposed for it. But a censor like Lynch, claiming to respect free speech and claiming to want a debate? Well the Orwellian hypocrisy was just too delicious for CTV to ignore. Clark opened with a powerful — but professional — timeline of Lynch’s bad behaviour. And he ended his interview with Dufresne with a pretty basic question: would you ever debate Levant? Dufresne pretended he didn’t hear the question — but tens of thousands of CTV viewers did.
The CHRC’s media magic at work!
I don’t understand why Harper’s government tolerates this. Doesn’t she work for him?
Defining Terrorism Down
Well, now we know who the administration considers “terrorists:”
The important part comes at the end: an email exchange between Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force, and Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert. Manzo is basically pleading to further negotiate to prevent bankruptcy, but Feldman is having none of it. Here is the exchange:
Robert Manzo, Chrysler restructuring expert: “I hope you think it’s worth giving this one more shot.”
Matthew Feldman, attorney on the President’s Auto Task Force: “I’m now not talking to you. You went where you shouldn’t.”
Manzo: “Sorry. I didnt’ mean to say the wrong thing and I obviously did. I was trying oto make sure that if we had to contribute to the solution you knew we had some room. Sorry I did not realize the mistake!!”
Feldman: “It’s over. The President doesn’t negotiate second rounds. We’ve given and lent billions of dollars so your team could manage this properly….And now you’re telling me to bend over to a terrorist like Lauria? That’s B.S.”
A terrorist like Lauria? Lauria represented a teacher’s pension fund in Indiana (among other bondholders), and had the temerity to insist that the government follow contract law.
Yeah, how dare he? And on top of that he had the audacity to point out that he was being muscled by thugs, Chicago style.
Meanwhile, the new director of the DHS says that terrorism doesn’t really exist — its just “human-caused disasters.”
“Retreat Into Apathy”
As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” — which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System — or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
More important, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”
Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.
And it’s an awfully hard process to reverse, once it “progresses” far enough.
COTS Thoughts
From Jim Muncy:
Now, you might ask: are you saying they are pretending to save money that was going to be “saved” anyways… because the program *is* coming to its natural conclusion in FY2010 and FY2011? Might they be posturing to look like they’re fiscally conservative at a time of economic crisis and concern about government spending and debt?
I would never say this.
But I believe this is what’s going on.
Say it ain’t so.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More from Jeff Foust.
“Restore The Vision”
Someone has set up a blog to track what’s going on with VSE and Constellation, and to describe how far from the VSE NASA drifted when Griffin replaced O’Keefe and Steidle.
“Pruning An Overgrown Tree”
“…so that it can fruit again.”
A story in the UK about shrinking my home town, Flint, Michigan. They might as well, if Lansing isn’t going to do anything to improve the business environment there. I suspect a lot of Wolverines were hoping that Obama would nominate the governor, to get her out of there. Not that her replacement would be much of an improvement. But they keep voting for them.
MicroRNA Replacement
…that may stop cancer in its tracks. I hope that this sort of research will continue to advance once we’ve socialized medicine.