Since we’re technically still in the holiday period, have a bit more silliness. This concerns a scheme that is a supposed to disincentivise drink-driving. A funeral home in Rome, Georgia, is offering… Oh, what the hell. I’ll let the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune, tell the story: Between now and noon on Thursday, drivers can […]
Month: December 2009
Chuck Norris on why Obamacare is Bad
You know Chuck Norris: martial-arts-film-star-bloke-turned-right-wing-commentator-and-walking-internet-meme. Yep. Him. Well, he’s identified exactly what’s wrong with Obamacare. It might mean publicly funded terminations of pregnancy. And imagine what state the world’d be in if the Virgin Mary had had an abortion. Go on. Imagine it. [A]s we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have […]
Public Spending – and the NHS in Perspective.
I have a vague memory of John Lydon telling the crowd at the first Sex Pistols reunion gig in 1996 (Woo-hoo! I was there!) that he’d had a message of support from the owner of Creation records. “Don’t trust Alan McGee,” he snarled. “He’s a very clever man.” […]
More on Ethics Teaching
Further to the post below, and by complete serendipity – David and I have asked for pre-publication access to the JME, but haven’t got it yet – this month’s Journal is crammed with stuff on ethics in the undergrad medical curriculum. Sophie Mills gives a student’s-eye account of the place of ethics in the curriculum […]
The Good of Small Things
A few nights ago, I went out for a curry with a doctor friend who’s just returned from a year working in Africa. She was telling me all about the experience and about its difficulties. Some of these difficulties are straightforwardly down to poverty; others are down to mismanagement or – if not exactly mismanagement […]
Teaching Ethics in Medical Schools
My attention has wandered recently to this editorial in Clinical Medicine, concerning the place and content of ethics education in the undergraduate medical curriculum. There’s nothing Earth-shattering in there, but the piece does draw out a few persistent problems with teaching ethics within the medical degree: […]
Too Braney by Half?
One of my favourite blogs is spEak You’re bRanes, “dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussions”. It’s splenetic, merciless and very, very funny in its dissections of the bigoted, ill-considered and illiterate bilge that gets posted under the guise of “discussion” on the BBC news website. To be fair, the Beeb has to […]
Libel Reform (again)
Further to Søren’s post just below here, it’s worth noting that the site to which he links hosts not only a petition, but also a facility whereby it’ll check who your MP is, and provide a pro-forma letter that you can edit and then email to him or her from the site. I filled that in […]
Support the Libel Reform Campaign and make life easier for the JME editors
You may not realise it, but one of the important tasks that the editors of the JME perform is to scan submitted manuscripts for potential libel. English libel laws are incredible strict and if we publish anything that is derogatory and likely to diminish a person or firms standing we may be sued for libel […]
Applied Clinical Ethics Course, Imperial College
February – June 2010, covering clinical ethics in theory and practice; autonomy issues; end-of-life issues; law and justice; moral dilemmas in practice. Full details here […]