A LIV reads a book

Remaining a blissful Low-Information-Voter (LIV) should be a low effort undertaking. It has not turned out that way. I had originally thought that avoiding Fox News and talk radio would suffice, but, alas, no, without the right wing nuts I lacked criteria to measure my uninformedness. What is the informed High-Information-Voter’s (hereafter, HIV) understanding of Benghazi-Gate, or IRS-Gate, or other incompetent-black-President-Gate scandal? Indeed, what is the subject I must be informed about? As a result I have to spend some quality time with my brilliant, inspired cohorts on the right. Given the consistency of the right wing ecosphere, considerable resources are expended in forming informed information. The proper informed belief is updated infrequently, touching base with the primary sources need only be once a week or less, and this leaves considerable time to remain uninformed by reading history or science.

I do enjoy the fictional works of SciFi, but a good science book will keep me improperly informed enough to be an official LIV. Without a reading plan I wander about the online library selecting titles in a random manner, recently my selections have been about diseases, plagues and genetic science. These subjects require a belief in evolutionary science, which nails me as a total LIV. A beneficial genetic change of only one in a billion replications will happen every day because of the large number of pathogens.

A beneficial change for the microbe may not be beneficial for the host. There are three areas the microbe is constantly trying to improve, first is infection of a host, second is replication and last is escape from one host into new host. The accepted theory is that this is purely random, recent laboratory studies indicate that DNA is manipulated by the microbes. This is scary, over billions of years microbes have evolved the ability to evolve on demand. This explains the extraordinary leaps microbes and viruses have consistently displayed when attacked by medical science, results that could not be explained by the mathematics of random chance. Modern medicine can follow this process at the molecular level, it is not random, instead it is an orchestrated response to the chemical soup surrounding the microbe.

Summarizing my readings in medical science, for microbes it is all about ecology, for humans it is all about greed. The microbes live in a pure natural world while humans live in a made up reality, a comfortable paradigm with good guys and bad guys. This human centric worldview gives the pathogens a significant advantage. As a LIV I wish to protect myself from a pandemic by providing healthcare and medicine to poor and sick populations, while the HIV refuses to give “free stuff” to “lazy people”, which gives an upper hand to the pathogen.

The information purveyor’s of the right tell of restaurant owners cutting hours to avoid providing health care. Why would I wish to buy food from sick people? Sick employees and food preparation, to this LIV, seems a bad idea. I have noted that healthy people are more productive, with better attendance, than sick people. These same providers of information talk of sickness brought to America by illegal immigrants, to the highly informed voter, sick illegal immigrants can scamper across deserts; to a medically informed Voter, disease travels with the businessman on an airplane.

The medical science is a far more entertaining, and frightening, story than one of illegal immigrants or lazy people. Reality does not serve a political agenda of less government. Reality would indicate a well funded, government supported, medical research community. Research and history calls for a universal health care system. History shows that the “political will” appears once 10% of the population is dead or seriously sick. History also shows that the response is never medically sound; it is always based on fear and bigotry. Like pathogens, politicians never miss an opportunity.