The Pessimist

Stop me if you’ve heard this one …

I have a friend who has a coworker who knew a guy who went on vacation to Mexico. The guy went to a local dive in a seedy end of town and had a few drinks too many. He woke up the next day in a bathtub full of ice. There was a note beside the tub that said “call an ambulance, you don’t have any kidneys anymore.”

Oh, isn’t that scary/funny. Last week you could check the urban legends site and find out that this story isn’t actually true. But this week, change ‘Mexico’ to ‘India’ and now you have a true horror story. Seems there is a thriving criminal entreprise in India that has stolen 500 kidneys from impoverished victims to sell to rich customers.

Should we be concerned about world where this kind of thing can happen? India’s 1 billion people, with 900 million of them so deperately poor that they can just disappear into a meat-pie factory where nobody will miss them, or care. Or China’s 1.3 billion people, living in a command-economy where there have been rumours for decades about executed prisoners having their organs harvested for transplants. Also an urban legend / capitalist scare-mongering? Maybe. Maybe not.

Artificial protien-faking chemicals in pet food. What next? Soylent green … it’s people!