From time to time I add a flu blogger to my list, and sometimes I drop one. If a blog seems to be covering the subject with some consistency and readability, I'll add it. If it isn't updated for a week or more at a time, I'll usually drop it. If it's just trying to make money off fear of flu, I don't even consider it.
A few weeks ago I added Inolesco: growth of the avian flu. I know nothing about the blogger, except that her name is Nancy Moreno, she's a registered nurse, and she lives in southern California. Her posts were pretty good, though they sometimes turned into a single long paragraph that was hard to read.
I'd noticed that her links included the WHO, CDC, Flu Wiki, and...Drudge Report? Hugh Hewitt? I shrugged it off. Drudge runs one of the most visually unattractive sites on the Web, and Hewitt I knew as a right-winger whose self-congratulatory book on blogging is really dull. OK, Ms Moreno is proselytizing for her political side as well as supplying information about H5N1. It's not what I would do, but it's her blog.
But if you follow the link to Hewitt's site, you'll find that he recently offered a spirited defence of torture as an acceptable means of extracting information from people the US government doesn't like. And at that point, while I try to run a nonpartisan site, I pull the plug on Ms. Moreno.
If she's really a nurse, and she's promoting the promoters of torture, she compromises whatever ethical impulse drew her into nursing in the first place. Her heart may be in the right place about saving people from avian flu, but help is available elsewhere from people who put their trust in hand-washing, not in waterboarding.
My comments may draw criticism from some Americans who will find me anti-American. To them I simply say: The most anti-American people on the planet are your president, his administration, and those who support them. They have harmed your country more than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed of doing.
