revere | January 5, 2010Conscientious refusal to participate in acts which are immoral although legal is a world wide phenomenon. It isn't new. We don't hear about the brave souls in highly repressive countries that risk death or imprisonment, but they exist. We celebrate them when they resist regimes we don't like, as in Iran. But we have our own prisoners of conscience. We know more about the ones in freer societies and their voices also deserve to be heard.
There are thousands in Israel. One group are the Shministim, "twelth graders":
On April 28, 1970, a group of high school seniors about to be drafted sent a…
revere | January 5, 2010Just a day into the New Year I was feeling feisty and issued a challenge to readers and the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) blogosphere in general. I asked for a critique of a fictitious uncontrolled, non-randomized non-blinded small scale clinical study. It was truly a fictitious study. I made it up. But I had a template in mind and I intended to go somewhere with the example and I still do. But it will take longer to get there than I anticipated because it has raised a lot of things worth thinking and talking about in the meantime. I was going to wait a week to give people a chance to read…
revere | January 4, 2010I was also a conscientious objector, in another war. I couldn't in conscience claim the kind of religious grounds that young Joshua Casteel did, but I have to hand it to the kid. This is an amazing story:
revere | January 4, 2010In early September swine flu was just ramping up in the US and there was no vaccine. CDC envisaged adequate vaccine supplies by end of October but in reality this was too optimistic. For a period of weeks, the news was full of stories of long lines at vaccine clinics and the frustration of worried parents who were anxious about the health of their children in a pandemic where children seemed to be most at risk. The flu struck in North America first, but eventually made its way to over 200 countries on every continent, some of them desperately poor. They didn't have to worry about too much…
revere | January 3, 2010Here's some forgotten history. Not ancient history, but nonetheless forgotten. Just a week over 30 years ago, the end of 1979, Afghanistan had a functioning government, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The fact that it functioned, which now sounds remarkable, was not a good thing as far as the US was concerned because this was also a communist government allied to the Soviet Union (just over its border to the north). In the flight from reality known as The Cold War, the US wished the functioning government in Afghanistan would be toppled. Does the phrase, "Be careful what you…
revere | January 3, 2010New York Times correspondent Don McNeil is an excellent medical reporter. He always asks intelligent questions at the CDC pressers and he writes good articles. And he's written one for The Times yesterday that I agree with, although his support for it seems to me less than objective. In essence he asked the country's flu establishment how well the US handled swine flu. None of his sources are CDC employees but all of them are deeply involved in flu and flu policy in one way or another. And they gave themselves a big pat on the back. I hope they didn't wrench their shoulders. That might be a…
revere | January 3, 2010It seems to us the battle between the secular and the religious is settling down into a predictable form of trench warfare. From the secular side (that's where my trench is located) comes this recitation of the now accepted responses to the now expected arguments of the religious against us atheists (hat tip reader LT). Many of these arguments involved some rather deep issues that are treated in a fairly superficial way. For example, Carl Sagan's remark that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not even sure what that means but I see no reason why it should be true. Or…
revere | January 2, 2010We've had other wars besides Iraq and Afghanstan djinned up or whipped on by our "free press." Sometimes it's good to remember that "the power of the press" also meant the power of the person who owned the printing press. People like William Randoph Hearst, who had the power to make "the splendid little war" known as the Spanish American War. The same power also gave us The Philippines via Commodore Dewey's Battle of Manila Bay (referred to by a British historian as "more a military execution than a real contest"). The power that gave us domination over Cuba in the name of Cuban independence…
revere | January 2, 2010It's easy to lose track of current events during the holidays, so here's an update of the week's most important news. We lead off with a breaking swine flu story:
revere | January 2, 2010I've noticed that whenever I have the temerity to suggest (e.g., here and here) that maybe the word of the Cochrane Collaboration isn't quite the "last word" on the subject and indeed might be seriously flowed, I hear from commenters and see on other sites quelle horreur reactions and implications this blogger doesn't believe in the scientific method. Why? Because "everyone knows" that a randomized controlled trial (RCT) automatically beats out any other kind of medical evidence and any Cochrane review that systematically summarizes extant RCTs on a subject like flu vaccines is therefore a…
revere | January 1, 2010First day of a new year. First day of a new decade. It's dark out. So it's important to keep even a small light on in Times Like These:
Lyrics for In Times Like These by Arlo Guthrie
In times like these, when night surrounds me
and I am weary, my heart is worn
And the songs they're singing don't mean nothing,
cheap refrains play on and on
The storm is here, the lightning flashes,
between commercials, they're taking names
singers run to where the cash is,
it's just another link in slavery's chain
I see the storm clouds rise above me,
the sky is dark and the night has come
I walk alone along…
revere | January 1, 2010I doubt many of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that at least one of The Reveres was sort of geeky while young (now, of course, he's just sort of geeky while old). I thought about this objectively (geeks don't think we are really geeky; we just think the things we do that others call geeky are "interesting") when I ran across (via Slashdot: warning sign #1) a link to The Technologizer (warning sign #2) picking the Ten Most Tarnished Brands in Tech. This isn't about scandals. It's about once proud brandnames that nobody cares about any more, like Netscape or Commodore. And on the…
revere | December 31, 2009Last day of 2009, another year of war. A good time to step back and try for perspective. We'll let a young Nanci Griffith do it for us with this wonderful song by Julie Gold:
Happy New Year to all our readers, whether near or from a distance.
The Reveres, New Year's Eve, 2009
revere | December 31, 2009Given the usual response to terrorist threats on airplanes, we expect the latest move to protect us will be to require us to travel nude. OK. Probably not. Republicans are too skittish about public nakedness. They prefer it in the privacy of their mistresses' beds. What we will see, instead, is yet another attempt at a technical fix, spearheaded by high priced security and aviation "consultants." I saw one of them, Mary Schiavo (former inspector general of the Department of Transportation) the other night on the PBS Newshour. She was hawking expensive explosive sniffers for airport check-in,…
revere | December 30, 2009When the US still had "mandatory" conscription for males it was still possible to claim exemption on the basis of a conscientious objection to war. While this usually required a religious basis and was almost impossible for doctors because of a supposed non-combattant role, we were still given full C.O. status as a doctor without a religious basis. The explanation for this legal certification is not relevant and it didn't happen without a protracted struggle which we had no reason to believe would turn out as it did. Its lack of relevance is because the end of the draft or the war did not end…
revere | December 30, 2009The caves in the Dordogne department in southwest France are most famous for paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux (the Dordogne is also famous for the being the home of microdot, whose blog The Brain Police is one of my daily reads). Now it has yet another claim to fame: the discovery of the first bat outside of the northeastern United States with White Nose Syndrome (WNS) Fungus (Geomyces destructans):
Biologists are struggling to understand a recent emerging infectious disease, white-nose syndrome (WNS), which potentially threatens >20% of all mammalian diversity (bats). WNS is a deadly…
revere | December 29, 2009Some needs to edit this to add faces from the Obama administration to those from the Bush administration. Because lives are still in the balance and Obama has his thumb on the scale. Jackson Browne:
revere | December 29, 2009When I recently got rid of my 15 year old car for one that is only 2 years old, I was amazed and impressed at the number of genuine safety features, many of them hidden or not obvious. Cars are simply much safer now than they were, even a decade ago, not to mention when I was a youth. Here's a dramatic example comparing the crashworthiness of a 1959 Chevy Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu:
Injuries are the major cause of death up to age 44 and the most frequent cause is motor vehicle accidents. Car crashes also cause injury and disability, and one of the more common comes from the sudden…
revere | December 28, 2009War can take and spoil lives in many ways. The killing doesn't stop when the war is over or a combat role is ended. This year again has seen record suicide rates for the US military, but one can assume the same is true for those fighting on the other side and for the millions of civilians caught up in it. This song by Canadian singer-songwriter Garnet Rogers is not about Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam. It could be about any war. And one bullet:
revere | December 28, 2009It's the end of the calendar year and the traditional time the media looks back on "the biggest stories of the year." There are websites about almost any subject (even one on a particular model of running shoe, I am told), but those of us who write specialized blogs (as opposed to ones about politics or current events) rarely expect our subject matter to show up on one of those lists. We've been writing about flu for over five years, here, and while re recognized the possibility our subject would come into vogue -- that's indeed why we were writing about it -- it still took us and everyone…