For most of the past 12 years, I've been on a mailing list called Online-News. It started as a nifty clearinghouse for practical and philosophical ideas for new media. Today, it's often a semi-public square in which we don hairshirts and wail about our inability to grasp the possibilities of tools that have been around since 1995. Or 1999. Or 2002. Or ... wait ... here's a dispatch from Silicon Valley ...
I kid because I care, I care because I think I'm happy that we have such high standards for what we should be able to do. That's great. We should be pushing the envelope. (And, given financial realities, we need to do so.)
Now consider the medical profession. Specifically, the common cold. Even those with scientifically and theologically dubious beliefs on the origins of life would concede that the common cold has been around for a few thousand years.
The cold, surely, has been cured. Right?
Not only has the cold not been cured, but this week, medical science actually took a step backward. Those over-the-counter medicines we've used to make our kids feel better? They don't.
The kids may beg to differ, but what do they know? They're kids.
So if your kids have colds? Ah, just run your hot water for 15 minutes at a time to get a bathroom all steamy, then sit in there with 'em. That'll provide slight relief.
I believe the journalism equivalent would be blogging with a typewriter and mail delivered by horse-drawn buggy.
We're in the 21st century now, doc. Care to join us?
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Not much I can say about this, because Chris Rock has already said it, and better. From this monologue:
I think doctors make too much money. You know why? Because they don't cure anything! Everything they cured, they cured 50 years ago! They ain't cured nothing in a long time, man! Diseases are just piling up, man! You got cancer, and sickle cell... Jerry's Kids still limping around. Come on, man! Get rid of something! Some diseases they just gave up on! They just said "The hell with it!" You know, like blindness. If you go blind, they don't got nothing for you! If you go to a doctor and tell him that you're blind, they say, "Hey, why don't you get this dog to drag your blind ass around?" What kind of cure is that?! Where's the medicine? Where's the science? "I'm blind! I can't see!" There's people that can see that can't handle a dog! Come on, give me a midget, or something!
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