This is the curious state of debate about the government's two main weapons in the fight against pandemic flu. At first, government officials declare that both vaccines and drugs are effective. When faced with contrary evidence, the adherents acknowledge that the science is not as crisp as they might wish. Then, in response to calls for placebo-controlled trials, which would provide clear results one way or the other, the proponents say such studies would deprive patients of vaccines and drugs that have already been deemed effective. "We can't just let people die," says Cox...

In the absence of such evidence, we are left with two possibilities. One is that flu vaccine is in fact highly beneficial, or at least helpful. Solid evidence to that effect would encourage more citizens--and particularly more health professionals--to get their shots and prevent the flu's spread. As it stands, more than 50 percent of health-care workers say they do not intend to get vaccinated for swine flu and don't routinely get their shots for seasonal flu, in part because many of them doubt the vaccines' efficacy. The other possibility, of course, is that we're relying heavily on vaccines and antivirals that simply don't work, or don't work as well as we believe. And as a result, we may be neglecting other, proven measures that could minimize the death rate during pandemics.

I added the italics there. the next time somebody hates on you for not getting the flu vaccine, mention to them that more than 50% of medical professionals agree with you.

Oh and also, relying on vaccines ad Tamiflu probably makes the situation worse because we don't emphasize proven preventative measures enough:

"Vaccines give us a false sense of security," says Sumit Majumdar. "When you have a strategy that [everybody thinks] reduces death by 50 percent, it's pretty hard to invest resources to come up with better remedies." For instance, health departments in every state are responsible for submitting plans to the CDC for educating the public, in the event of a serious pandemic, about hand-washing and "social distancing" (voluntary quarantines, school closings, and even enforcement of mandatory quarantines to keep infected people in their homes). Putting these plans into action will require considerable coordination among government officials, the media, and health-care workers--and widespread buy-in from the public. Yet little discussion has appeared in the press to help people understand the measures they can take to best protect themselves during a flu outbreak--other than vaccination and antivirals.

"Launched early enough and continued long enough, social distancing can blunt the impact of a pandemic," says Howard Markel, a pediatrician and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan. Washing hands diligently, avoiding public places during an outbreak, and having a supply of canned goods and water on hand are sound defenses, he says. Such steps could be highly effective in helping to slow the spread of the virus. In Mexico, for instance, where the first swine flu cases were identified in March, the government launched an aggressive program to get people to wash their hands and exhorted those who were sick to stay home and effectively quarantine themselves. In the United Kingdom, the national health department is promoting a "buddy" program, encouraging citizens to find a friend or neighbor willing to deliver food and medicine so people who fall ill can stay home.

In the U.S., by contrast, our reliance on vaccination may have the opposite effect: breeding feelings of invulnerability, and leading some people to ignore simple measures like better-than-normal hygiene, staying away from those who are sick, and staying home when they feel ill. Likewise, our encouragement of early treatment with antiviral drugs will likely lead many people to show up at the hospital at first sniffle. "There's no worse place to go than the hospital during flu season," says Majumdar. Those who don't have the flu are more likely to catch it there, and those who do will spread it around, he says. "But we don't tell people this."

All of which leaves open the question of what people should do when faced with a decision about whether to get themselves and their families vaccinated. There is little immediate danger from getting a seasonal flu shot, aside from a sore arm and mild flu-like symptoms. The safety of the swine flu vaccine remains to be seen. In the absence of better evidence, vaccines and antivirals must be viewed as only partial and uncertain defenses against the flu. And they may be mere talismans. By being afraid to do the proper studies now, we may be condemning ourselves to using treatments based on illusion and faith rather than sound science.

I didn't even quote the part where the man who knows more about flu vaccine research than anybody in the world says we have no clue whether vaccines make a difference.

It's important to note that these authors have no quarrel with vaccines in general, and readily admit the vaccines are effective in combating diseases such as polio.

Charlie: "Poppy, I hope you are happy today."

Me: "Thank you Charlie. I wish to show you some form of affection, but I don't know what would be acceptable. May I shake your hand?"

Charlie: "Yeah."

[Hands are shaken]

Me: "May I give you a hug?"

Charlie: "Yeah."

[Hug is exchanged]

Me: "Do you want to box?"

Charlie: "No."

Me: "Well, how about a hi-5, then?"

Charlie: "Yeah."

[High 5 is exchanged.]

According to my wife, this day should go down in family history as a day of positive breakthroughs for Charlie and me.

UPDATE! Today, Charlie did, indeed, wish to box, so I took on the three of them, including Little T, who came after me saying, "Peas Me?"

I say from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all.

John Henry Cardinal Newman, as quoted by Graham Greene, as quoted by Edward Short here.

As I stuck it out, I began to plan the pleasure I would have after midnight mass on Saturday, April 11, when my pledge would come to an end. For six weeks I had treasured a special bottle of red wine to be drunk slowly and savored that night. But as mass went on at St. Boniface's Oratory in Brooklyn, with all the lighting of candles and singing of hymns, I began to be tempted by thoughts of Guinness.

Instead of praying and concentrating on the glories of the resurrection, I began to imagine a pub with a large window and the moment of watching the miracle of the black liquid and the tilted glass, and of standing there and watching the Guinness settle and then, almost as though this were a secular sacrament, the glass being slowly filled to the brim with the creamy clerical collar. For six weeks I had been good, and now, when the religious ceremony had ended and we were told to go in peace, I set off with my companions to Pete's Waterfront Alehouse and I proved to myself, if not to the wider world, that the notion that Guinness doesn't travel, or can only be drunk with pure satisfaction in Ireland, is a myth.

i'd like to say we purchased our new Our Lady of Lourdes statue to honor the Marian feast day, but in truth, we ordered it weeks ago and it just arrived today. But we did, um, put it out front to celebrate the feast day.

I'd be happy to tell you the maker, so long as you promise to order it through your local Catholic book/gift store if you have one. They don't direct ship to consumers anyway.

Why Our Lady of Lourdes? Well, although I do have somewhat of a devotion to Lourdes (details here), the main reason is that it seems odd to buy a 27" statue that is going to rest on the ground and have Mary looking down. This one was one of the few where she is actually looking up.

Burris: So if I can talk to my law partner who's been, you know, in New York trying to drum up business

Blagojevich: Oh, good for you,...

Burris: (chuckles)

Blagojevich: good for you.

Burris: 'Cause you know he's trying to get a part of that, ah, Federal bailout stuff.

Blagojevich: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Burris: Okay, 'cause you know we're, you know he's, we've got a financial law firm here so they're trying to get involved in that.

I note here, that as much as this is all madness, aside from this being excellent evidence that Burris perjured himself, it doesn't appear that there's much illegal going on in this conversation.

And by the way, I never did get myself any of that federal bailout stuff...

Brown's message has been called anti-Catholic, but that's only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church's past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)...

In the Brownian worldview, all religions -- even Roman Catholicism -- have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It's a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized "religiousness" detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don't suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion's dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who's too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they're making or how many times they've been married.

These are Dan Brown's kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who's a thoroughly modern sort of messiah -- sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

VATICAN CITY, 24 MAY 2009 (VIS) - At 6 p.m. today, after celebrating Vespers, the Pope travelled by car to the Polish military cemetery at Montecassino which contains the bodies of 1,052 soldiers who died in the battle of May 1944 against German forces occupying the hill on which the abbey stands.

The Holy Father lit a votive candle and recited the following prayer for the fallen of all countries in all wars:

"O God, our Father,
endless source of life and peace,
welcome into Your merciful embrace
the fallen of the war that raged here,
the fallen on all wars that have bloodied the earth.
Grant that they may enjoy the light that does not fail,
which in the reflection of Your splendour
illumines the consciences of all men and women of good will.
You, Who in Your Son Jesus Christ gave suffering humanity
a glorious witness of Your love for us,
You, Who in our Lord Christ
gave us the sign of a suffering that is never in vain,
but fruitful in Your redeeming power,
grant those who yet suffer
for the blind violence of fratricidal wars
the strength of the hope that does not fade,
the dream of a definitive civilisation of live,
the courage of a real and daily activity of peace.
Give us your Paraclete Spirit
so that the men of our time
may understand that the gift of peace
is much more precious than any corruptible treasure,
and that while awaiting the day that does not end
we are all called to be builders of peace for the future of Your children.
Make all Christians more convinced witnesses of life,
the inestimable gift of Your love,
You Who live and reign for ever and ever
Amen".]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/prayer-for-memo.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/prayer-for-memo.html Pope Benedict XVI War Mon, 25 May 2009 11:34:29 -0600 From David Denby's look back at the work of Victor Fleming, director of, incredibly, both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.

In this manner, the three men worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, sustained by Dexedrine, peanuts, and bananas, a combination that Selznick believed would stimulate the creative process. On the fourth day, according to Hecht, a blood vessel burst in Fleming's eye. On the fifth, Selznick, eating a banana, swooned, and had to be revived by a doctor. Many good Hollywood movies have been saved by last-minute revisions, but this ill-fed, hazardous, all-male acting-and-writing marathon must be the strangest of all interventions.

I'm sure many a director wishes they could return to the days where directors could smack around their starlets and humiliate leading men onset for their alcoholism.

]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/covert-ops.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/covert-ops.html Movies Sat, 23 May 2009 08:56:41 -0600 So, since we switched over to Movable Type 4, several things about my own blog have annoyed me. One is that I could not figure out how to separate the "Lu" in Papa Lu from the "on" that follows it in the line just below the title. I even found the spot in the template where the code that produces this line resides and I still couldn't fix it after adding an empty space. Well, I just fixed it and am posting it here in case anybody else using MT4 has this problem:

After you log in to Movable type, go to the blog you wish to fix and click the "Design" button towards the top of the screen. When it loads, you'll see a box with a heading that says "Quickfilters." One of the links under there should be "Template Modules." Click this link and in the list that then appears click "Entry Metadata"

You will now be inside the template that produces that text. Find the line that begins with the word "By." It should read somewhat as follows:

By <address class="vcard author"><$MTEntryAuthorLink show h_card="1"$></address> on

You might think that all you need to do is add a space between the code that prints the name of the author of the post and the word "on." That's where I made my mistake trying to fix it the first time, but you'll notice there's already a space there. So I put a space in between each of the bracketed lines, so my template now looks like this:

By <address class="vcard author"> <$MTEntryAuthorLink show h_card="1"$> </address> on

I don't know exactly which of the two extra spaces fixed it, but it worked.

Yes, it's a small problem, but when I got my 20th email addressed to "PapaLuon," I decided enough was enough.

QUICK UPDATE: I don't know if this works the same for all styles, or not, but I think it should. In case it matters, I'm using "Minimalist Green." I imagine it would at least be the same for all "minimalist" styles.

UPDATE 2: ARGH! Figures! this is only an internet Explorer thing. All of you people who use real browsers (I only have IE at work) were probably wondering what the h I was talking about. ]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/mt4-tip.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/mt4-tip.html Meta-blogging Tue, 19 May 2009 13:19:02 -0600 Just a few posts down I mentioned Daniel Mitsui as one of my favorite bloggers. As it turns out, Daniel's wife just gave birth to their firstborn son, and the medical bills for 3 days of labor and a caesarian delivery are staggering. He has put some of his original artwork up for sale at reduced prices to pay the costs. If you've not seen his stuff before, well, I don't know what to say except that you have to see it. This is an opportunity to obtain original, stunning works of art and help a young family.

]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/help-a-brother.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/help-a-brother.html Sun, 17 May 2009 00:25:04 -0600

Notre Dame's craven hunger for secular esteem is hardly unique in American Catholic history. Think how giddy with joy we were when the skirt-chasing son of a bootlegging Nazi appeaser won the election in 1960 on the votes of dead Chicagoans. From the grubby, roughnecked immigrant families of eight or nine Vinnies and Patricks who'd filled the ethnic parishes and pickle factories, we'd finally made our way into the "mainstream," to join the lapsing members of the old American elite -- whose Protestant faith and natural virtues were even then dribbling down their pants leg like John Cheever's spilled seventh martini. We've arrived. There goes the neighborhood.

]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/i-nominate-john.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/i-nominate-john.html American Church Higher Learning Wed, 06 May 2009 16:13:30 -0600 ...here is a picture of my boys with their cousin Rachel, who is a month younger than our Baby T.

]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/because-not-eve.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/because-not-eve.html Family Wed, 06 May 2009 09:57:38 -0600 (Yes, I know this is four days late, but the timing is purely coincidental.)

In college I was a member of "The Household of St. Joseph", a group of men considering the priesthood. We prayed nightly a devotional prayer to St. Joseph, which I think is a wonderful prayer. A few months ago, I searched fruitlessly for the version we used.

Today I listened to Father Z's podcaZt of March 19, and in it he reads the prayer in Latin and English. I put my transcription gloves on and punched it out. Here it is, copyright laws be danged (at least until somebody's lawyer calls me) and with somewhat arbitrary line breaks:

To you oh Blessed Joseph do we come in our tribulation,

and having implored the help of your most holy spouse,
we confidently invoke your patronage also.

Through that charity which bound you
to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God,
and through the paternal love
with which you embraced the Child Jesus,
we humbly beg you to regard graciously
the inheritance which Jesus Christ has purchased by his blood,
and with your power and strength to aid us in our necessities.

Oh most watchful guardian of the Holy Family,
defend the chosen children of Jesus Christ.

Oh most loving father,
ward off from us every contagion of error and corrupting influence.

Oh our most mighty protector,
be propitious to us
and from heaven assist us in our struggle with the power of darkness,
and as once you rescued the Child Jesus from deadly peril,
so now protect God's holy church
from the snares of the enemy and from all adversity.

Shield too each one of us by your constant protection,
so that supported by your example and your aid,
we may be able to live piously to die holily
and to obtain eternal happiness in heaven.

Amen.

Here it is as a google document, formatted for printing, though unfortunately google docs have a limited range of fonts (you get what you paid for). Here it is in the intended font, but as a pdf. Pick your poison.

]]> http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/devotion-to-st.html http://papafamilias.stblogs.org/archives/2009/05/devotion-to-st.html Feasts Mary and the Saints Tue, 05 May 2009 13:11:51 -0600