Additives, self-slaughter and excommunication

There's a lot of talk these days about cognitive impairment. When it's real and how it's measured is disputed, especially when the subjects are public figures. 

My original diagnostic test is the most reliable. It can be tailored to holders of officers of public trust who must tap their precocious memories to recall the sequence of their lies for future repetition and perhaps expanded to people who actually seek to heal the world. 

They will have to name the first ten ingredients in Skittles, Kool-Aid, Twinkies, Jolly Ranchers, Pop-Tarts, frankfurter casings and other pseudo foods. Then they will have to rank order these components according to toxicity, as New Yorkers do their mayoral candidates. 

For the top prize, finalists must correctly spell any of the ingredients chosen from those with a petroleum origin. A sculpture of the winner will be displayed at the Smithsonian. 

Theologians are constantly badgered by skeptics of divinity at work on earth. Sometimes they concede there is evidence, but it is refutable and crave an unexplainable manifestation to get their argument over the finish line. 

Eureka!

The human body has figured out how to break down, absorb, expel, digest or otherwise process man-made laboratory chemicals, and adjourn the deadly toll for decades. 

How was such intelligence programmed?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered an accelerated phaseout of many food additives, such as dyes and preservatives, that research indicates brain, kidney, bladder and other cancers, liver vandalization, nerve cell harm, neurobehavioral disorder, severe allergic reactions and more. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary confirmed, "For the last 50 years, American children have increasingly been living in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals.”

The FDA and HHS want to fix the plague by politely asking the dyes to self-deport from recipes, without statutory or regulatory coercion. Carcinogens are the charm key to shelf-life, which unlocks cost-savings to manufacturers and retailers. 

Outlawing the death-dealing dyes should be done immediately and without compromise. If the government can fire employees in the name of "efficiency,” it can terminate the reagents, polishes, impurities, plastics and cannonballs from sham food. 

It seems the lobbyists are a protected class and are as hard to dislodge as hagfish from the public's gills.

There should be a one-year deadline to purge our food and drinks from these contaminants. Non-compliance should be punishable by crippling sanctions. The government can put its foot down, when it wants to, and it need not always be on the public's neck. 

Consumers should stop implicitly trusting the hypnotic ploys of advertising, assuming that if products were noxious and injurious, the government, as benign parent, would ban them. 

It's the free market because it is free from governmental social responsibility.

What would happen if the government made the removal of harmful dyes and preservatives compulsory and not advisory and the manufacturers refused to comply? Would they go shopping for a compatible judge to subvert and slough off the rule of law, as Governor Hochul has done to nurture congestion pricing?

Sometimes the spirit of the law is better upheld by contravening than enforcing it. That may be the case for the deportation resisters. 

Democracy and anarchy sometimes work at cross purposes and exert themselves paradoxically.

As democracy clings to life, assisted suicide, cosmeticized as "medical aid in dying" is on Albany's agenda. There are enough votes in the state legislature to give the green light to mentally competent people who doctors predict will die of their terminal illness within six months, to preempt nature by in effect pulling the plug themselves, by means of a lawful cocktail of lethal drugs.

There is potential for abuse and even criminality. There may be conspiracies, cover-ups and machinations. Vulnerable and unstable people may be exploited by interested parties. Assessments of judgment capability are subjective, as is obvious in many cases involving court-ordered guardianships. 

Motives of compassion and greed, like truth and fiction, can sometimes overlap like in Venn diagrams. Agatha Christie would have a heyday devising plots for her mystery novels.

There are other issues: would people be eligible on the basis of low quality of life, due to the severest disabilities that don't satisfy the six-month window of mortality?  

There may be monetary incentives and intrigues between doctors and interested parties such as designing family members. A surcharge will expedite the mailing of a passport, maybe something similar will accelerate the delivery of souls?

Perhaps DOGE can come up with another common sense answer. Maybe bullets for the afflicted? Quite plausibly a new perk to be negotiated through collective bargaining.

The New York Post weighed in on assisted suicide, declaring that "even under the sanest of governments, state-sanctioned suicide is obscene. In Oregon, there is reportedly pressure to slash the waiting time to two days, while expanding the authorized prescribers beyond physicians. There are other horror stories, such as a man being approved for self-slaughter because he was upset about hearing loss, as was a healthy young woman with mood swings. 

What is irrational can lend itself to be rationalized.

In Switzerland, assisted suicide, provided it's not for legal gain, is as legal as yodeling. Same for the Netherlands, where someone proposed a green light district to abut the Red. The Post claims that the Canadian government tried to persuade Paralympic veteran Christine Gauthier to opt for suicide to make both her and her request that the Veterans Affairs department install a wheelchair ramp go away.

There is a natural segue between respect for life and the late Pope Francis. His moral ideals were implicitly ecumenical. 

Already as a priest during the fascist regime of Juan Perón in Argentina, he preached peace to power. His church has been a rock and defender of civilization, and has largely defined its moral ideals and culture, although its political history, it's been argued, as been intermittently controversial, for alleged accommodations and alliances.

Pope Francis bravely proclaimed the illuminating duty of activism to thwart the forces of death.

World War II was the ultimate trial. The Catholic Church sheltered tens of thousands of Jews and condemned "the constant violations of laws … and practices of National Socialism." Many individuals, driven by their faith, sacrificed their security and sometimes their lives, to save strangers.

But even holiness can be uneasy walking the tightrope of diplomatic necessity, especially during the Hitler era. The Church has been unfairly accused of complacency and hypocrisy for not battling the authors of the most massive genocide in history. Could it have done more?  

An accusation is unwarranted, but speculation is vindicable.

Some of the leading architects of the Nazi genocide, such as Hitler, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Goebbels and Hans Frank, were Catholics by birth. Some had lapsed, some rebelled with lifelong contempt, others after renunciation, returned to their faith after the war (whether sincerely or as a ploy to appear more sympathetic to the hangmen at Nuremberg), and others never practiced at all.

In all German-occupied territories, there were Catholics (the percentage cannot be reliably determined) who failed to perceive the connection between moral duty and their Church's teachings or refused to rise to it. There were also some professed Catholics who were possessed by the insane belief that the Church and Nazism intersected and were in harmony.

Among the latter was the vile Bishop Alois Hudal, greased the escape route to South America of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s "Angel of Death," and others he knew were savage war criminals. The Catholic Church severely disciplined him, but they did not impose on him the supreme punishment of excommunication. Not on  Hitler either.

Would it have made a difference? The Nazis were avowed enemies of the Catholic Church as they were to all humanity. But perhaps it could have been a signal? Maybe it would have given pause to some of the cogs in the machinery of extermination. The official Vatican newspaper had affirmed that membership in the Nazi party was "irreconcilable with Catholic conscience.”

Even more than membership, participation in the genocide itself.

If the Church had excommunicated these Nazis, there would certainly have been reprisals and martyrs. But the Church has accepted and paid this price many times in history, over matters of profoundest principle.

Even after the war,  when there was no more threat, could the Church have excommunicated these war criminals posthumously? Perhaps there is no precedent for such a retroactive statement, but it would have produced a glorious echo down the corridors of time.

It wouldn't have saved lives, but it might have mitigated the indignity of reflection. What would Francis say? Or did he?