On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 11:52:02AM -0800, Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr. wrote: > > On Feb 1, 2005, at 9:38 AM, DJA wrote: > > >Exactly. The War on Terrorism(tm) is the equivalent of the March of > >Dimes' fight against birth defects: the only solution to either is to > >eliminate people or wait for evolution to clean up after itself. > > That is an unfair characterization of the fight against birth defects. > > Evolution does *not* always "clean up after itself" nowadays. Modern > medicine often rescues those whom evolution would have "cleaned up" in > the past. Sometimes this is a great cost to society. >
Evolution is patient. > Unlike "The War on Terrorism(tm)", the fight against birth defects has > solutions that can be shown to work. Making sure that women who might > get pregnant get enough folic acid has been a huge boost, for example. > I can cite many others. While this does not eliminate *all* birth > defects, it certainly eliminates unnecessary ones. > I sort of agree, except the crowning achievement of TMOD was the iron lung, and they had little if anything to do with the folic acid research and media blitz. The FDA, OTOH, used your tax dollars to fight the publicity that has prevented so much human misery tooth and nail. Gee, now that I think of it, TMOD started out to defeat polio; had absolutely nothing to do with the development of polio vaccines; and then switched to birth defects so as not to close up shop and stop collecting money. So, birth defects are nothing to joke about. But TMOD may well be. -- Lan Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616 -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
