Is Your Candidate “Human?”

A political test to rival comparing the fictional characters candidates create as novelists . . .
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Is Your Candidate Human?

In the film Bladerunner, organic androids called replicants have escaped onto the planet Earth. They are almost exactly the same as human beings.

Have you ever wondered whether or not your political candidates are really human? Well, in San Francisco they wonder about things like that. . .

Is a particular candidate human or an insidious replicant, possessed of physical strength and computational abilities far exceeding our own, but lacking empathy and possibly even bent on our destruction as a species?

Wisely, they chose the only test that can be applied to distinguish a replicant from a human being; namely, the Voight-Kampff empathy test.

They asked the classic list of questions, each looking for an emotional reaction to the implied death of a living animal. My personal favorite candidate’s answer to the question “It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?” His response: I’d look for money.

I’m not sure if they detected a replicant, but I’m pretty sure they detected a politician.

The Wave Magazine.

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Is Junk Food a Junk Freedom?

From Michael Pollan’s “On the Table” blog:
So who are these “food police” we’re starting to hear so much about? The term has begun showing up in media accounts of campaigns to reform school lunch or in discussions of the food industry’s growing legion of critics in the media. It’s the “food police” who want to get soda out of the schools and who argue that fast food outlets should disclose nutritional information about what they sell. The “food police” supposedly want to take away your constitutional right to a Big Mac — or, at the very least, your right to enjoy a Big Mac with a clear conscience. . .As near as I can determine, the whole notion of the “food police” got its start in the fevered brain of