Yet American views of Mr Clinton's trip, which includes a visit to Hong Kong, are likely to change as the notoriously insensate White House press pack sniffs a new direction the warm reception the president will get from ordinary Chinese.

ECONOMIST: The new, and improved, China awaiting Clinton

Yet as things stand, our impotence in the face of our extinction means that a vast amount of medical resources are expended in the last few weeks of people's lives purely in order to render our deaths insensible and insensate.

BBC: A Point of View: The biggest decision

For the Greeks, the medical term for rabies (lyssa) also described an extreme sort of murderous hate, an insensate, animal rage that seizes Hector in "The Iliad" and, in Euripides' tragedy of Heracles, goads the hero to slay his own family.

WSJ: Rabies: The Plague Behind Zombies and Vampires