The heroic Andy Wakefield

The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It’s not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”

Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn’t seem to be much self-sacrifice in Wakefield’s past or any prospect of martyrdom in his future. Jesus did say “suffer the little children,” though, which we can quotemine to apply appropriately to these promoters of childhood mortality.

After reading about callous fraud Wakefield, though, you need some context. How about this?

Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March — compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

“This is a lot of cases, to put it mildly. In past years we’ve had very few cases,” said Rebecca Martin, head of WHO’s office in Copenhagen for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization.

“There’s been a buildup of children who have not been immunized over the years,” she said. “It’s almost like a threshold. When you have enough people who have not been immunized, then outbreaks can occur.”

Wakefield’s body count is much higher than Jesus’s or Mandela’s.

Christian barbarians

The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

I don’t want to hear another word from Catholics about my destruction of a mass-produced cracker. Their extremists use violence and the destruction of private property to deface a work of art in a museum.

It’s not even a particularly anti-religious work — that luminous golden glow is as reverential as the bloody, gory, suffering Christ figures mounted in Catholic churches all around the world.

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Tragedy in Brazil

Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here’s the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you’ll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:

First of all you should know that the impure can’t touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven’t been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything
impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin
without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all
my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth
which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after
wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I’d like
to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is
called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery.
I need the visit of a faithfull follower of God in my tomb at least once,
I need him to pray in front of it asking for God’s forgiveness for
what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the
sleep of death to life.

At least this savagery won’t be pinned on atheists, not this time. I don’t think we can blame religion, either, although his insanity clearly found expression in religious idiom — this guy was just malignantly deranged.

I hope no one is respecting the killer’s final wishes, and that his corpse is treated like dead rotting meat, nothing more, and buried with exactly the same treatment anyone else’s body would receive. And then may his name be forgotten.

So pregnancy means a total surrender of autonomy?

This is how to handle a depressed person:

On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.


On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide.

Don’t get pregnant, ladies! It means that every risk you might take becomes a criminal offense! I always thought it was a joke to criminalize suicide, too, but here’s a case where they’re actually prosecuting a woman for the crime.

Next up: every time you kick a man in the balls, you are a mass-murderer.

Students are “soft-bellied targets”

The animal rights loons are ranting again. These people are simply terrorists, as you can see in this quote from their odious website.

Every time a vivisector’s car or home — and, eventually, the abuser him/herself — blows up, flames of liberation light up the sky.

They’re quite proud of taking the unconscionably violent position. And now, just to show how low they can sink, they have announced a new target: our students.

Debuting The Soft-Bellied Target and New Resistance Tactics: Bringing the War to the Student Body

When we attack professors, we can only expect limited gains. They are deeply entrenched in the holocaust, have vested financial interests, and enjoy a network of support and protection. Students, however, have no round-the-clock police protection, no access to the FBI, and no access to legislators. The weakest link in the chain is the student body. Vivisectors-in-training can be shut down with relative ease.

They also are the next generation and it is our responsibility to ensure that they are the last generation. Unless we intercede now, the students of today will be the mutilators of tomorrow. Conversely, there will be no animal torturers tomorrow if we effectively eliminate them today.

How are they going to target these students? With intimidation. They are bragging about one example now, a young woman named Alena who mentioned wanting to follow a research career who they harrassed into at least saying she would abandon her plans (who may be just saying that to shut up the crazies, and who may also be a phony stooge of the haters), and they have a list of ways they are going after our students.

1. By and large, students pursuing careers in research science truly want to help people, not victimize animals. Their indoctrination into the world of laboratory torture is slow, methodical, and deliberate. While they are being groomed, we are obligated to intercede and educate these young scientists with truth. As Alena admitted, “I was naive…I really just did not know about all this stuff.” And she is not unique.

2. Students also need to understand that making the wrong choice will result in a lifetime of grief. Aspiring scientists envision curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic. We need to impart a new vision: car bombs, 24/7 security cameras, embarrassing home demonstrations, threats, injuries, and fear. And, of course, these students need to realize that any personal risk they are willing to assume will also be visited upon their parents, children, and nearest & dearest loved ones. The time to reconsider is now.

3. Like all young adults, college students are acutely concerned with how they are perceived by their peers. They need to maintain a certain persona if they wish to continue to enjoy the acceptance of their community. This makes them infinitely more susceptible to negative and inflammatory publicity than their veteran-mutilator counterparts. When education fails, smear campaigns can be highly effective. Abusers have forfeited all rights to privacy and peace of mind and, if an abuser-to-be should fail to make the correct choice now, NIO is here to broadcast all of their personal information. Remember, young people document every facet of their personal lives online. In about 30 minutes, we were able to compile an impressive and comprehensive profile for Elena.

Notice that among the tactics they advocate are car bombs, injuries, and fear. These are home-grown terrorists, nothing more.

If they think professors are protected, wait until they scratch an innocent student, though — their obscure organization will instantly become a pariah organization, everywhere.

This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?

He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.

Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.

Oops, I think that letter was supposed to be burned

An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II’s diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory “gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature.”

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, “must be meticulously followed.” Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the “highly embarrassing” position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

Child-abuse activists in Ireland said the 1997 letter demonstrates that the protection of pedophile priests from criminal investigation was not only sanctioned by Vatican leaders but ordered by them.

“The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican’s intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere,” said Colm O’Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

Yeah, I have serious reservations of a moral character about the Catholic church, that’s for sure.

I am bemused by the threat that if a church dared to invoke civil authorities to protect the children in their charge from rapacious priests, their actions would be overturned by the Vatican. Is that basically saying that if locals do anything other than work with the Vatican to quarantine child-rapers, the Vatican will do whatever they can to put the rapist right back into his position? Sweet. They really don’t care at all about their congregations, do they?

We have our own barbarian subculture

An Arizona Democrat, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, has been shot and possibly killed by an assassin armed with an automatic weapon. Her offices had earlier been targeted for vandalism for her support of health care reform.

Isn’t it amazing that health care reform has become such a polarizing issue, and that the people who are raging the loudest are those who would benefit the most?

I’ll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I’ll bet he’ll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.

Holy crap. This was Sarah Palin’s idea of a clever campaign earlier this year: she had select Democrats, including Gabrielle Giffords, targeted with a gunsight symbol.

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What a vile creature. Perhaps she ought to consider not inciting the deranged assholes who follow her.

And that’s not all.

(via Firedoglake)

It wasn’t just shoddy, it was fraud

The infamous Andrew Wakefield study that claimed to find a link between autism and vaccinations is still being scrutinized, and the latest investigation has uncovered evidence of faked data.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield’s paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children’s parents.

Children died because of the hysteria fomented by the contemptible Wakefield. How does that guy live with himself?

Here’s how: he’s in denial. Watch Anderson Cooper call an apoplectic Wakefield a liar.

What’s the difference between the Vatican and the Mafia?

At least the Mafia doesn’t tolerate baby-rapers in its ranks.

Otherwise, though, they’re both shady organizations with very tightly closed ranks and a sense of privilege. It seems the Vatican is also suspected of criminal enterprises — it has its very own private, secretive bank that is accused of money laundering, and recently had about $30 million in assets seized.

I don’t think the Vatican has any ties to grisly gangland murders, though…oh, wait.

Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial.

While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.