We interrupt this weblog...
...for a word about Mad Cow. Disease, that is. Hamburgers. Movie stars.
A sensible word, though, something that's in short supply nowadays.
Ralph Bristol writes:
In 2004, the U.S. beef industry slaughtered 32-million cattle. Yesterday, the U.S. confirmed the third case of mad cow disease.
Good Lord. The third bloody blankety-blinkin' case. We're all doomed.
None of those three got into the food chain.
Ok, now, just how many sick cows got into the food chain?
Repeat after me: none.
If they had, your chances of eating beef from a mad cow would be approximately one in 10 million.
We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed!
By comparison, your chances of being killed by lightning in your lifetime is 1 in 56-thousand. Your chances of being killed while crossing the street are one in 612. You have a one in 228 chance of dying in an auto accident. Your chances of drowning in your bathtub are one in about 10-thousand.
If you do a Google News search for "mad cow," you will find 3,680 pages of links to news stories about mad cow disease. No doubt about it - Mad Cow is the scare du jour, but I submit that the facts don't support the perception.
There are plenty of things for us to be conserned about. Legitimately concerned about. Terrorism. You want diseases? MERSA and H5N1 flu. Entitlements bankrupting our country—under an ostensibly "conservative" administration. Loss of individual liberties because we simply don't value them. Politicians and other evil "leaders" who shamelessly and selfishly subvert our national interest in favor of their own. Equally evil voters who do the same, yet expect politicians not to.
Ok, you want "apocalyptic" disasters? Asteroid impacts. The Yellowstone Caldera (look it up) erupting. These are things that are going to happen—the only question is when. And millions will die when they do happen. Maybe all of us will.
And we're all tied in knots over Mad Cow.
About 800 people will die this year from choking on their food. If 800 people died from mad cow disease, practically no one would eat beef, the beef industry would suffer a huge financial loss, and tens of thousands of people would be out of work as a result.
800?? It would take only one person dying from eating Mad Cow-tainted beef for the whole beef industry to go into a tailspin, or some other even worse aviation-related metaphor (help me out here, Hogarth).
We evidently have no idea how to keep things in proper perspective.
Why not?
Rather, why do only a few of us seem to think rationally?
There's a non-trivial chance that I could die within the next five minutes from a myocardial infarction, but I'm not afraid of that. I'm rather enjoying life, thank you. I have reason not to, but I do nonetheless. Not by mindlessly ignoring life's hazards, but by keeping them in perspective and enjoying life's little pleasures, such as writing, having (a few) others read what I write, and best of all, learning as a by-product of writing. Life isn't long enough to learn all there is to be learned.
Sorry for the sermon, folks. I'm not one to gather inapplicable or fallacious "wisdom" from sources such as movies, but Tommy Lee Jones did have a great line in Men In Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
Yeah, we know it. Thing is, as smart and rational as we can be individually, why?
The Cigar Intelligence Agency linked with Wednesday Roundup.
The Watcher of Weasels linked with Submitted for Your Approval
Posted by: Steel | Wednesday, 15 March 2006 at 09:44 AM