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Troika
Knowing that many of my friends have different interests, I present several different items for comment:
1. This morning, when there's normally mindless pap, a local radio station accidentally allowed actual conversational debate to leak through: one DJ was defending his decision to never vaccinate his children, and the others were talking about how diseases used to wipe out thousands or millions every few decades, but vaccination has curbed this. His take was that "humans are the only species that does not allow nature to take its course," i.e. Darwinism. Thoughts?
2. The Pope has had a feeding tube inserted to help his caloric intake. a) would the reports have placed feeding tube in the headlines if Terry Schiavo hadn't taught us all the lingo? b) He is *so* not long for this world. Watch for the white smoke at the Vatican, kids.
3. Yesterday, school buses throughout large sections of Ontario north of London were delayed for two full hours. By fog. WTF?
1. This morning, when there's normally mindless pap, a local radio station accidentally allowed actual conversational debate to leak through: one DJ was defending his decision to never vaccinate his children, and the others were talking about how diseases used to wipe out thousands or millions every few decades, but vaccination has curbed this. His take was that "humans are the only species that does not allow nature to take its course," i.e. Darwinism. Thoughts?
2. The Pope has had a feeding tube inserted to help his caloric intake. a) would the reports have placed feeding tube in the headlines if Terry Schiavo hadn't taught us all the lingo? b) He is *so* not long for this world. Watch for the white smoke at the Vatican, kids.
3. Yesterday, school buses throughout large sections of Ontario north of London were delayed for two full hours. By fog. WTF?
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1) Humans are the only species that knows not to let nature take its course.
Also, Darwinism only applies to genetic traits that die out because individuals with the trait don't live to adulthood.
2) a) I haven't seen anyone making a big deal out of the Pope's feeding tube. But I expect either pro-Schindler people to point out that the leader of the Roman Catholic Church doesn't consider it extraordinary life-extending measures, or pro-Michael Schiavo people to suggest that the Pope is mentally incapacitated because no one with any quality of life would want one.
3) Can't help you there. Fog sucks.
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The definition of a species is that two creatures can produce a non-sterile offspring. The offspring of two closely related species, such as a mule, is sterile.
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2) Everything the pope does these days is major news. I'm sure that someplace online there's a website dedicated to tracking all his bowel movements. How hard up is the Vatican for cash? I bet John Paul's soiled Depends would rake it in on eBay.
3) I can understand it. A few years ago, there was a huge, huge, huge pileup on the 401??? between TO and Windsor caused my heavy fog. And maybe the school didn't use up all its snow-days, so they're looking for excuses.
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Of course that only happens in a small amount of people, so the question is, do you want to take the chance?
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It's a divine right and responsibility. Can Jesus Christ just give up being Jesus Christ because of illness. I think they argument might be that it is simply not possible, since JP is the Pope, and the only way to "resign" is through death.
I could be wrong. I just seem to remember something about this.
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Could be both, really. Or maybe my reason is just an added complication.
Although, I'm not sure. They call it the "Throne of Peter" not the "Throne of Christ". While he is God's representative on earth, he takes Peter's place, not Jesus'. But since Peter they've come up with the whole infallibility thing, although that too has been played with. Now the Pope isn't always infallible, just sometimes. Certain statements are now considered inspired by God and those ones are infallible.
I gave up Catholicism a long time ago. I can't remember all the twist and turns. Any more knowledgable Catholics out there wanna take a shot?
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Wasn't the idea that Peter took Jesus' place?.. and then someone took his place, and so on?
If not, then wouldn't the Pope simply be taking the last Pope's place?
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The Great Schism was when Eastern and Western Christianity spilt -- Constantinople and Rome.
http://www.kosovo.com/schism.html
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http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/grtschism1.html
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http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13539a.htm
Each side went through a bunch of Pope's before it all ended. Boniface was dead long before the reconciliation and had been succeeded by Innocent VII.
Pope Buffy's face, Pope Boniface... amusing :)
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For greater clarity: there were no vampires involved in the Great Schism.
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If a beaver builds a dam to flood a meadow so it can build a lodge rather than trying to find a pond in which to build the lodge, is it 'not letting nature take it's course'?
2. [something intelligent about the (hopeful) evolution of Catholosism past the point of having a pope]
3. WTF fog? Or WTF delaying buses?
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2. a) Did feeding tubs lingo int he media start with her? I'm pretty sure there have been lots of high profule cases where that lingo has been used. b) in a related note, according to the author of Angels and Demons (not sure how reliable he is) no Pope in history has ever had an autopsy. I guess it makes them too human or something? I wonder what all these reports of PJPII will do for that angle?
3. Must've been bad fog.
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"Lysol kills 99.9% of bacteria" -- so what? They reproduce so fast they're all back STRONGER in only a few minutes!
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2a. Not sure. I lean toward thinking it may have been placed in the headlines that way regardless (or irregardless, just for
3. If that were in Nova Scotia, they would have canceled school as soon as they heard that fog was in the forecast. In fact, I bet they did cancel it here because of the fog in Ontario. You never know. It could come here, so it's best to just take the week off.
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Vaccines are different though. I'm not sure how they would help create a super-strain of virus so can you explain it? Antibiotics work by killing off bacteria in your body and the bacteria can become resistant to that specific antibiotic. Vaccines work by inducing a primary response in your immune system which might take weeks for your body to figure out how to fight and generate the proper anti-bodies. If your body sees the same or similar virus in the future, it can skip the primary response and go directly to the secondary response since it knows how to deal with the problem. This can get rid of the virus within days instead of weeks and you probably wouldn't even notice that you were infected. So your body isn't really doing anything different than it would without the vaccine except that it already has the antibodies produced so it can jump to the second stage. I don't know how that would change a virus into a super-strain.
When you do get a vaccine your body will produce antibodies to fight off what they inject you with. It is possible that the antibodies that get produced might differ just enough from a new strain of virus that your body thinks it is fighting it effectively when in fact its not. So a virus that would normally be taken care of by your body without a vaccine would not work properly. But that would be for a specific individual and not everybody, so the "super-strain" would only affect the people who mis-created the antibodies.
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Nothing "changes" anything into a super-strain. Super-strains are a result of an upset in the microbial ecological balance. As such, members that ordinarily would have been out-competed (generally a genetic mutant), will instead, end up prospering. This is the basic principle behind super-strains that result as a product of antibiotic treatments. At the very least, this therapy is suspected of speeding up the process of bacterial succession for more virulent strains. These processes are a bit easier to measure, and in fact can be done through a simple lab experiement with a couple of agar plates over a period of a day or two.
From an ecological perspective: Generally, when you do something to mitigate the impact of one population or species, you risk giving an advantage to another population or species.
So there are few things that may come into play:
1. Introducing a vaccination into an organism may indirectly and unknowingly to us, target other unknown organisms, thus allowing them to uncharacteristically persist in the environment - not only in the 'closed' system of the individual, but also in the external environment. Of course, we do not become aware of negative impacts until a new pathogen is identified. And even then, we are unlikely to accurately and reliably trace its roots to be the consequence of vaccination.
Regardless, the end result is still a disease that will require some intervention in order for the organism to persist in it's environment. So I suppose, the argument is really moot one, when considering that the results will always be the same.
2. My database crashed for a project I'm working on before I got to point #2, so I was interrupted and now forget :(. I assure you that it was really smart though.
I think the arguments make theoretical sense, although in the end if there is a vaccination available for something I perceive to be a threat, I'm-a-gettin-it.
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Like you said, if there is a flu pandemic then it would be smart to get the vaccine.
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1. I'd really consider humans to be part of nature, not separate from it. But if you go just by the spirit of the DJ's comment, I trust he'd be happier if people routinely died from infections bourne of cavities from unbrushed teeth? Realistically, I think any animal would love to interfere with nature to advance their interests -- it's just that humans have become the most proficient (though not necessarily foresighted) at doing so...
2a. Reports probably wouldn't have assumed that people knew what "feeding tube" meant -- it's entered the lexicon now. That said, it sounds like his is somewhat different, if it's going in through the nose. I guess the plan is that it is supposed to be temporary?
2b. It will be interesting to see what happens, if it turns out that the current Pope could be kept "alive" indefinitely through heroic intervention. Who gets to make the call? Would his staff be fulfilling God's will by allowing him to die, or fulfilling God's will by keeping him alive?
3. Some of my most pleasant elementary-school memories involve walking to school through the fog. Suck it up, kids.
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2a) I doubt it would be as major a detail if the whole controversy weren't running amok in the states with Schiavo. The media is like an obsessive-compulsive child with ADD; it can't get enough until something else that's shiny catches its [lazy] eye.
2b) Speaking of the media, most news stations already have their correspondents lined up for the Pope's funeral. Amen to that.
3) Last October I was walking across the commons one night and it was covered in fog so dense you couldn't see the other side, but it wasn't very foggy anywhere else in the city. You could see the streetlights streaking through the fog and a few shadowy figures trudging across the green. It was my experience with creepy unexplained fog, although I'm sorry to report that, to my knowledge, it didn't delay any buses.