How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed

Some of you may be aware that many parents are not giving their children the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine out of fears that it may cause autism. These fears were generated by a paper published in 1998 by the British medical journal Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others suggesting such a link. The findings were challenged but the journal only withdrew the paper in 2010.

The British Medical Journal has now published a detailed investigation and concludes that all of the twelve original cases reported had had their data misreported or altered in order to make the link.
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Your government may not protect you

If you, as a US citizen traveling abroad perfectly legally, are suddenly taken into custody by a foreign government and tortured, wouldn’t you expect your government to express outrage and take steps to protect you? You would be wrong, if that government is a client state of the US.

Glenn Greenwald tells us of the appalling treatment meted out to18-year old Gulet Mohammed by Kuwait and the limbo he has been placed in.

This silence implies that either the Kuwaiti government is acting on orders of the US or that Obama and Clinton only care if US citizens are detained by countries like North Korea and Iran, even though the treatment of captives by those governments does not come even close to the levels of barbarity that Kuwait has demonstrated with Mohammed.

Blasphemy

Laws against blasphemy constitute the ultimate concession by religious people that their god does not exist. I think religious leaders secretly realize that the non-existence of god is such an obvious fact that allowing people to publicly say so might cause the whole religious house of cards to topple, and so they have to resort to legal measures to prevent people from pointing out the absurdity of their beliefs.

But blasphemy laws are not only stupid, they are evil. We currently have the terrible situation of a Pakistani Christian woman who is under a death sentence for blasphemy and two days ago a Pakistan provincial governor was shot to death by his own bodyguard because the governor had opposed this blasphemy law. What is particularly disgusting is that mainstream religious organizations in Pakistan are lauding the murder and militant clerics in Pakistan have been protesting any changes to this barbaric law.

The Islamic countries seem to be the worst perpetrators of this blasphemy evil. What is worse is that they are trying to gain international acceptance for their medieval ideas, using the United Nations as a vehicle. In November 2010, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the 192-member General Assembly voted 76-64 (42 abstentions) in favor of a resolution condemning the ‘vilification of religion’. While this is a smaller margin than last year (81 to 55 with 43 abstentions) and is non-binding, it is still disturbing that so many countries would support it.

How the case against Julian Assange came about

One of the big political questions this year is whether the US government will be able to get their hands on Julius Assange. The brutal treatment given to Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the leaked US material, is a likely template for the way Assange will also be treated should he fall into US government hands. These actions by the US government are meant to frighten and thus deter any future potential unauthorized leakers. What they want is to return to the system whereby only selected people in government get to leak secrets to selected reporters to advance their own agendas.

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Bradley manning and Supermax prisons

The January/February 2011 issue of the New Humanist has an article (not online) by Sharon Shalev on the Supermax prisons in the US where hardened criminals are kept. Here is part of her description of conditions inside.

Prisoners in a typical supermax will spend their days confined alone in a windowless seven-square-foot cell which contains only a concrete slab and a thin mattress for a bed, a small table and stool made of tamperproof materials, and a metal combo unit of a wash basin and an unscreened toilet, located at the cell front within full sight of prison guards.

Prisoners are confined to their cells for 22 and a half to 24 hours a day. They will only leave it for an hour’s solitary exercise in a barren concrete yard or for a 15-minute shower on alternate days. Technology and design allow for these two activities to take place with a flick of a switch and without direct staff contact. Food, medication, post and any other provisions will be delivered to them through a hatch in their cell door, with little communication or time wasting.

The regime of relentless solitary confinement and tight prisoner control in a typical supermax is made possible by prison architects. Without their professional knowledge and careful calculation and assessment of every design detail, it would not have been possible to hold hundreds of prisoners in complete isolation from each other within a single, relatively small, building for prolonged periods.

And it is this extreme functionality, calculated to design out human contact and enable maximum prisoner isolation and control, that makes supermax prisons so chilling… This control of every aspect of prisoners’ daily lives extends beyond the control of their bodies and movement across time and space.

You may recognize that these are the conditions under which Bradley Manning is being held. This is how the US treats its political prisoners, just the way that ruthless authoritarian regimes do in order to suppress any dissent.

The masochistic relationship of religious people with god

I described yesterday how I use the Noah’s flood story to get Biblical literalists to confront the fact that the story, like many other stories in the Bible, describes god as a monstrous genocidal maniac. In this post, I will describe some of the ways they respond.

Last year, I wrote about a discussion with a religious woman who stopped me on the sidewalk outside my office to hand me some Jesus literature. At some point she started talking about Hitler, as such people invariably do. I reproduce part of the Q and A I had with the Jesus woman.

Q: Do you believe that Noah’s flood actually occurred? A: Yes.

Q: In that flood, god deliberately murdered all but the eight people in Noah’s family, including tiny infants. Wasn’t that worse than anything Hitler had done? Didn’t that make god the worst genocidal maniac in history? A: No.

Q: Why not? A: Because all those people died because of their sins.

Q: What about the infants? Doesn’t it bother you that god murdered vast numbers of tiny newborn infants by drowning them? What had they done to deserve that awful fate?

At this point, she started making stuff up, the way that religious people do when they have no answer. They think they can get away with this because they assume that the person they are talking to does not know the Bible. The doctrine of original sin that says that even newborn babies are also sinners has always been a tough sell, even for the most ardent believers, and she did not even try to pull that one on me. She instead said that god had immediately gathered up in his arms all the babies who had died in the flood. It is a nice cozy image but irrelevant. A murderer who cuddles his victim immediately afterward is still a murderer, and even creepy to boot. It is also totally fictitious. I told her that the Bible said no such thing. As far as the Bible was concerned, in drowning babies god was carrying out his plan exactly as envisaged and I challenged her to show me where in the Bible it said that god had scooped up the drowned babies.

She was stumped and asked me to wait and went off to get reinforcements from the rest of her group and came back with a middle-aged guy and a younger man. But not only could they not back up her assertion of god’s act by providing me with biblical verses (which I knew they couldn’t) they had no better responses to the questions I posed to them.

Q: Is murdering a baby an evil act? A: Yes.

Q: Is drowning huge numbers of babies evil? A: Yes.

Q: Wouldn’t a huge number of babies have drowned in the flood? A: Yes.

Q: So aren’t you worshipping an evil, infant-murdering god? A: No, because if god does something, it cannot be evil.

At that point, I could not help laughing at the absurdity of the logic. When I asked the same question (in a private email correspondence) of someone named Henry (who also believes that Noah’s flood actually happened and is not perturbed by that act), he too gave an incredible reply: “You have to take into account that God is the creator and he has the right to destroy His creation for reasons He chooses.”

In other words, we are merely possessions of god that he can torture or murder at will because he created us and thus owns us. This extraordinary position was also taken by some unidentified religious person to Christopher Hitchens (starting at the 6:55 mark). In other words, the same people who insist that each of us are precious in god’s sight, that he knows each hair on our head, and that he cares about our personal welfare can, when cornered, turn on a dime and say that he has the perfect right to treat us as if we are disposable commodities, to be tortured and murdered at his whim, just because he created us.

I also had a very similar exchange with a commenter to an earlier post where he tried to justify god’s command to stone to death rebellious children by arguing two points: that someone who rebels against his parents is also rebelling against god and is thus on the road to evil and will end up committing murder and rape, and so being stoned to death was a good thing, a form of pre-emptive crime fighting. This is of course a patently ridiculous argument and not to be taken seriously. But the other argument was the same as Henry’s, that since god owns us, he can do what he wants with us. The ironic thing was that this exchange was in response to my post about how religion can make good people do bad things, sort of proving my point. Only a truly religious believer could justify stoning to death of children.

It does seem to be unavoidably the case that if you believe in god and take these allegedly holy books as revelations of his divine will and instructions for how you should behave, you are ultimately forced into a masochistic relationship with your god, where you accept any and all atrocities committed by god, even against you and your loved ones, because he is your master.

The only way out of this is to pick and choose what parts of the holy book you consider the ‘good bits’ and want to follow and create a tortuous re-interpretation of the plain text of the words of the ‘bad bits’ that it makes a mockery of the holy book being divinely inspired, because what you are doing is imposing an externally derived ethical sensibility that has no religious basis onto your supposedly divinely inspired book. If you are willing to do that, why use the book as a moral basis at all?

There is something disturbingly pathological about the relationship of Biblical literalists to their imaginary god. Having someone demand that you love and worship him even while he abuses you is bad enough. To comply with such a demand when you can simply walk away seems to me to be a telling indicator of a masochistic personality.

How Wall Street wins whatever happens

If you ask anyone how the last two years have been, the answer would be “Terrible!” Unemployment rocketed up to nearly 10% officially and probably about 20% unofficially and shows no sign of coming down soon. Homes are being foreclosed left and right, throwing people onto the street. Food banks are reporting difficulties in meeting the increased demand for their services.

But not everyone has been hard hit. As Bloomberg news points out:

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses — six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The very institutions that created so much distress for so many people were able to get the government to not only bail them out but to gut many of the new regulations that would have prevented the kind of reckless actions that might cause a repeat of the crisis.

The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years to aid economic recovery.

Can anyone doubt that we have an oligarchy?

In fact, corporate America has been amassing huge amounts of cash by firing workers and squeezing the remaining ones to take on the increased workload. This ‘business strategy’ goes under the euphemism of ‘increasing productivity’. As a result, they increased their profits that have been used to pay huge bonuses to their top executives and raise their stock prices. Look at the Dow Jones index over the past two years.

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Does the index bear any resemblance to the conditions of actual people?

Ted Rall’s animation succinctly captures what is going on. (Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow taps into a similar vein.)