The doctor's autograph

Looks like my wife Lisa, a die-hard Olympics fan, will need a new knee soon. Ten years as a catcher in softball and a few years in collegiate vollyball are finally taking their toll. So we're getting things ready for a few months' recuperation this summer - we just got a twin bed from some friends and set it up in the room next to the downstairs bathroom, since she won't be walking far for a while.

Meanwhile, remember Debi Thomas? She won a bronze medal in figure skating in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary while a freshman at Stanford. Nowadays she's now an orthopedic surgeon doing hip and knee replacements at our main medical provider, Carle Clinic in Urbana IL. Here's her website: docdebithomas.com.

The immunological argument against immigration

Here in Small Town, Illinois, we don't see much of the illegal-immigration crisis aside from an occasional Spanish name in the newspaper's police column, usually someone arrested for drunken driving or domestic violence. Immigrant crime isn't even a big issue in the large nearby cities.

But while my wife and I were discussing the recent news about vaccines and autism (apparently John McCain linked the two recently) we stumbled across an argument in favor of strict immigration control: these people pouring over the border haven't had their shots and some of them are likely to be carrying God-knows-what infection that's been practically eradicated in America. For us and our children, that's a compelling reason to support closing our southern border. It also seems to be a compelling reason to keep kids away from government programs that service the children of illegal immigrants, such as Head Start.

UPDATE: a measles outbreak in San Diego by way of an unvaccinated 7-year-old child who brought it from Switzerland.

Dalrymple on Freud

Theodore Dalrymple reviews George Makari's Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Incipit:

What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?