Book spines

Books 2014 #TBT

The now annual books of the year list takes its third bow next week. The impetus for tracking what I read each year — other than inspiration, accountability, and memory — started as a bonus list tacked onto the end of the Movies 2014 list.  Books 2014 was just a list, yet I am expanding it for this #TBT to provide what I remember of these books.

A memory test three years later, here are the books I read…in 2014. […]

In Defense of Vaccination #TBT

Vaccines

Whenever anyone says they are anti-vaccination the first image I think of is this one:

The photo is reductionist, of course, but it’s also powerful.  Powerful because it encapsulates the current anti-vaccine debate: Vaccines cure and prevent deadly and debilitating diseases and yet are viewed as an olde tymey relic.  For pro-vaccine advocates vaccination’s benefits are established history and to argue otherwise is as incomprehensible as arguing against the Holocaust.  For anti-vaccine advocates there’s a mountain of “evidence” and the wisdom of mothers and fathers with first-hand “experience” and “logical” caution.

I use quotation marks, because I am pro-vaccination; this post is in defense of vaccination: a scientific, humanitarian, and moral position. […]