I suddenly had a thought: what are the demographics of gay marriage supporters and opponents. In particular, does heterosexual opinion of gay marriage differ by marital status?
I put in two minutes of searching and didn't find any survey results I could analyze, so I'm chucking the idea. I can't justify spending longer on it, when there's paying work to be done. I can only afford the time to write about the easily available data.
So: spoiled by Google. What power they have: Google has the ability to suppress links to information that its owners don't want disseminated. And for some people, at least me, insufficiently easy access to that information will lead to the silencing of my dissenting viewpoint.
But somehow I can't work myself into a lather about this. Not paranoid enough.
An interesting attack on the World Health Organization for allegedly bending to activist demands instead of using the most effective methods available.
The article criticizes WHO for promoting nets instead of spraying to reduce the spread of malaria -- claiming that this is a not to environmental groups. And the WHO's third world anti-tobacco campaign comes under fire -- are smoking-related diseases really worth the amount of money the WHO spends on discouraging smoking?
Interestingly, we saw direct evidence of both of these campaigns during our three weeks in Mali (Nov-Dec 2001). Spraying was off. There were public campaigns promoting the use of mosquito nets. Nobody was using them, though -- perhaps because it was the dry season, or perhaps because compliance is poor.
The residents of my mom's village knew that smoking is bad for you, and often admonished my mother not to smoke -- between drags on the cigarettes they had bummed from her. The education campaigns are there, and the message is delivered successfully -- they reached rural, illiterate folk 100km from the main highway and 60km from the power grid. But I didn't see any evidence of behavioral change.
DDT certainly is effective at killing malaria vectors. It was the insecticide used in Europe and North America to eliminate malaria in the postwar period. And it doesn't require any compliance from the people below. The risk, I suppose, is sickness and death in animal and human populations -- such as the near-extinction of the California Condor -- after decades of spraying and bioaccumulation.
Basically we're trading off lives lost now to malaria to the possibility of environmental damage and lives lost later to spraying. In the West, knowing less than we know now, we chose spraying and now live with the consequences. The WHO chooses not to spray, perhaps for sound medical, scientific, public health reasons; perhaps because of pressure from lobby groups.
Do the Malians get a choice?