Don't give Deepak Chopra a platform, or, If you can get a flu vaccine, GET ONE

Recently Forbes magazaine (and Danny Fisher) gave Deepak Chopra a platform that's not needed (and in the process did no favors for the Dalai Lama).

Deepak Chopra is...how to put this delicately ... he's...a... quack...

• "When we say, "a physical basis for consciousness" we are forgetting that everything physical is at the most fundamental quantum mechanical level really non-physical."



• He believes the folks who murdered and committed mayhem in Mumbai were really attacking the United States. I think I'm being fair in characterizing it that way.



• Chopra is completely ignorant of quantum physics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and hawks his schtick based on his audience's ignorance of physics:
  "Light can act like a wave or a particle, but not both at the same time. It defies ordinary logic, but Einstein and his colleagues discovered that light 'decides' whether to act like a wave or particle depending on the observer."



• Finally, Chopra winks and nods at the anti-vaccination movement, inter alia: "[A Salon.com article re: Oprah Winfrey's quackery, which Chopra did not have the integrity to provide a link] sneers at the popular movement linking autism with childhood vaccination, yet current understanding looks at autism as a complex, multi-factorial condition in which some cases could be influenced by an outside factor like a vaccine."

As a Buddhist, I'm appalled at the way in which folks like Chopra who say some Buddhist-lite kind of things get a free pass.

And in case you get any more woo-woo advice about the H1N1 flu vaccine, (not that Chopra's done that explicitly, but just in case) here's a bit of inoculation:

To know what's at stake here, go out and read The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry.

Forget about all the Dharma books if you haven't read this book (imperfect as it is). You truly, really need to understand the scope of what a serious influenza pandemic is before you listen to troglodyte New Age hucksters trying to give you advice that might kill you if you heeded it.

The first precept is: don't kill.

That means: get the H1N1 vaccine if you can. If you're allergic to eggs, don't get it. Or, if you're healthy and in one of those lower priority groups (like me) don't get it until the kids & sick have gotten it. If you're not allergic to eggs, and there's no other barriers to getting it, the risks of not getting it far, far outweigh the risks of getting it. That's because everyone who gets the vaccine is denying the flu millions and millions of chances to evolve into something deadlier. So you're not just getting this for yourself, you're getting it for all humanity (not to mention pigs and chickens). To get the details read the book.