It's not just you. Disqus is being pissy again.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Deeky W. Gashlycrumb's newest fragrance, Buttered Popcorn for homme.
Recommended Reading:
rikyrah: One Day In, and the GOP is Already Disenfranchising People of Color
Sady: Why I Didn't Delete Tiger Beatdown [TW for sexual violence, threats, harassment]
Charli: Actually, We Don't Know How Many Civilians Are Dying in Drone Strikes.
Joel: The Agonizing Last Words of Programmer Bill Zeller [TW for suicide and sexual violence; this link is extremely difficult to read, but important. More on Bill here.]
scatx: Oh, Science – What's Your Point?
Andy: GLBT History Museum Opens in San Francisco's Castro District
Renee: Zora Neale Hurston Biography
Strumpet: 32nd Down Under Feminists Carnival
Leave your links in comments...
Ugh, Joe Biden, Shut Up
During the Congressional swearing-in ceremony, Vice President Joe Biden was on hand to greet new members and pose for pictures and other stand-here-and-smile-and-hope-the-president-doesn't-die duties, and every time a daughter, niece, grand-daughter, or whatever young female relation was introduced to him, he made the same joke: "No dates/no men until you're 30." Har har.
[Video Description: Just scene after scene of Vice President Joe Biden meeting little girls and young women, and saying some variation on "No dates/men until you're 30," followed by family members laughing politely.]
Apart from the fact that Biden's a hack, and a hetercentrist hack at that, and the fact that there is a distinct (and creepy) difference between making that horrible garbage joke to a little girl and a woman who is in her 20s (especially while you're sort of leering at her? ew), I can't even begin to put into sufficiently contemptuous words how NOT the job of the Vice President of the United States of America it is to even jokingly be the hall monitor of young women's sexuality.
That Joe Biden loves to make sexist jokes (and express his sexism in other ways, ahem) is not news, which is why he shouldn't have been made vice president. But of course treating women as less than isn't a disqualifying characteristic for the executive branch.
Being a woman is.
I Love the Smell of Corporatocracy in the Morning
President Revs Up Campaign to Make Peace With Business:
The appointment of Mr. Daley begins a reshuffle of the senior White House staff that is expected to bring more business experience into the president's inner circle, administration officials say."Where "the American people" equals Wall Street executives.
...The president has been reaching out directly to U.S. companies, meeting with 20 chief executives last month to ask for ideas on policies that would inspire them to invest and hire. And on Feb. 7, Mr. Obama will cross Lafayette Park from the White House to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, his longtime political nemesis, to discuss working together on job creation.
"The administration took some positive steps recently, striking a bipartisan agreement to extend current tax rates, moving the ball forward on the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement, and reaching out to the business community," says Thomas J. Donohue, the chamber's president. "We're not going to agree on everything, but there's a lot we can get done for the American people."
Meanwhile, Obama is also set to name Gene Sperling as director of the National Economic Council. I like Sperling: He was Clinton's chief economic advisor during her campaign, and he helped run an international charitable project designed to assist women in developing countries start and run their own businesses.
The catch is that the helped run it for Goldman Sachs, and got $800,000 for his services. He's also made about $200,000 in the past few years as a speaker for various Wall Street firms.
As much as I like Sperling for some reasons, appointing him to head the NEC isn't a move that dissuades the appearance that Obama's administration is too enmeshed with Wall Street financial firms and the banks. I don't believe there's no one in the nation who's got the same talents at Sperling but doesn't have what ought rightly to be considered a conflict of interest re: ties to Wall Street.
Also: Sperling's had the job before. He headed the NEC from '96-'00 under Clinton. Ezra Klein notes:
Obama's personnel decisions have shown a strong preference for prior government experience. William Daley, who was named chief of staff earlier today, is a former Secretary of Commerce. Jack Lew, who replaced Peter Orszag as head of the Office of Management and Budget, held the same position under President Clinton. Robert Gates, who leads the Defense Department, was a holdover from George W. Bush. Larry Summers, who Sperling is replacing, was Treasury Secretary under Clinton. And the list goes on. Expectations that Obama would begin to turn to people whose primary experience was outside government have not, thus far, been borne out in his staff shakeup.Hope and change looks more and more like the same old shit.
Daily Dose of Cute
Video Description: Dudley tries to figure out how to play with a new toy, which was a gift from Nana Shakes. He's not sure what to do, so he'll just take a nap and figure it out later.
Your Corporatocracy Has Arrived
So, Obama has chosen Bill Daley as his new chief of staff.
Who's Bill Daley, you may ask? Oh, he's just "a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts for the nation's second-largest bank. William M. Daley also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant defense contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system," succinctly explains the New York Times, in their piece titled "Business Background Defines Chief of Staff."
Here in Chicagoland, we also know him as Mayor Richard Daley's brother. Depending on who you ask, being from the Daley political dynasty is either a recommendation of greatness or, um, the opposite. Plus 3/8ths pure evil.
I suppose the same thing can be said about Daley's coziness with Corporate America. Depends on who you ask whether that's a good thing.
The president thinks so.
Well. It's not the first time we disagree on something, now is it?
Further Reading: Digby, D-Day, Ezra, Greg.
Meet Tzvika the Turtle
A veterinarian places Tzvika, an injured female turtle, on a carpet at the Wildlife Hospital in the Ramat Gan Safari near Tel Aviv January 5, 2011. Now she's a cyborg turtle.
About two months ago Tzvika was run over by a lawn mower, suffering severe damage to her shell and a spinal injury that affected her ability to use her rear limbs. The wheels, attached by veterinarians at the Safari, elevate the turtle to keep the shell from being worn down and enable her to walk.
More here.
This story has a particular sweetness to it for me...
When I was a kid, my granddad, who lived in Queens and had a backyard the size of a postage stamp, had two pet box turtles for whom that postage stamp was a majestic kingdom. Tommy and Matthew. They'd lived there since my mom went off to university, maybe before. When Grandpa died, they were relocated to Indiana to stay with us, where they lived an indoor life, since we didn't have a fenced-in yard.
Tommy made his escape one day while Mama Shakes was gardening. A creek ran behind the neighborhood; it was there, we figured, he made his new home.
Matthew didn't seem to have any desire to leave his cushy life, where he didn't even have to do tricks or expend any effort to attain a steady diet of raw hamburger, fruit, and other goodies. But he did wander in the road one day, where he was hit by a car.
He was still alive, but a fucking mess. Mama Shakes scooped him out of the road to take him to the vet. My father gently suggested that maybe the best thing would be to put Matthew out of his misery. "I HAVE KNOWN THIS TURTLE LONGER THAN YOU!" she shrieked, terrifying and exhilarating me in equal measure.
The vet humored her. Wounds were cleaned and stitched. Matthew's shell, shattered into thirteen different pieces, was put back together like a jigsaw puzzle, and covered with some sort of clear, glistening epoxy to hold it all together. He was given fluids and drugs, to make him comfortable.
Matthew's back was broken. His back legs didn't work any more. The vet expected him to die.
But Matthew rested and healed. And then he scootched himself over to his bowl with his front legs, and carried on with life just as he had before. The vet said, "If I'd have thought for a second he'd survive, I would have taken a before picture!"
We took Matthew home, where he lived out the rest of his days, in shiny-shelled bliss.
Weapon of War
[Trigger warning for sexual violence on a mass scale.]
One of the most heinous expressions of a rape culture is the use of rape as a weapon of war—and, as has been previously discussed here, the prevalence and intensity of ongoing, endemic sexual violence against women in Congo has been described as the worst in the world. Hundreds of thousands of women have reportedly been raped in Congo, with sexual violence so widespread that Doctors Without Borders has said "that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo."
In August, a mass rape was reported in the town of Luvungi, during which hundreds of women were raped by rebels over the course of four days.
And now it has happened again: "Dozens of women were raped in a coordinated attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo on New Year's Day, Doctors Without Borders said Thursday."
The humanitarian agency said 33 women were raped in Fizi, South Kivu, in the eastern part of the war-torn country.5,600 survivors of rape.
"Women had been restrained with ropes or beaten unconscious with the butt of a gun before being attacked, some in front of their children," said Annemarie Loof, an official with the agency, commonly known by its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres.
..."MSF is extremely concerned about the current situation in and around Fizi," Loof said Thursday. "People are fleeing the area fearing further violent attacks."
The agency provided medical and psychosocial care for 5,600 rape victims in North and South Kivu in 2009, it said.
Once again, I will advocate donating to Doctors Without Borders, who are doing such good and necessary work in places where rape is devastating entire populations of women and children.
Over the past few days, there have been an alarming number of stories about birds falling out of the sky and fish dying in large numbers, and I am seeing references to these stories everywhere. And that's understandable; I don't mean to suggest it isn't, because I'm interested in those stories, too.
But women are being raped in mass numbers in Haiti and DR Congo, day after day after day after goddamned day, and that has somehow failed to capture the interest of the global community in the way dead birds and fish has.
Which troubles me.
To put it mildly.
I'm not suggesting it has to be an either-or situation; I believe humans are capable of holding multiple thoughts in their heads, of caring about multiple issues simultaneously. We are multitaskers, we humans. Built that way.
I'm just saying I would like the women of Haiti and DR Congo to get at least as much attention, fuck, even half the amount of alarm, that dead birds and fish are getting.
These women matter. Their lives matter. Their health and safety and right to live a life free from the constant threat of brutal rape as the daily business of war matter.
Contact the State Department. Contact your Senators. Contact your Representative. (If you're not in the US, please feel welcome to leave links for contacting MPs or other government officials in other countries in comments.) Make your voice heard. Tell them you are thinking about the women in Haiti and DR Congo. Tell everyone you can that these women matter. Mattering is the only way they will ever be safe. Our teaspoons have to be our weapon of war against rape.[Previously on the DR Congo Rape Epidemic: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten.]
"An elaborate fraud"
In completely unsurprising news, discredited and disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield has been found, apparently more conclusively, to be a liar. For those who do not know who Wakefield is, he is the man who set off the vaccine scare by linking the MMR vaccine to causing autism. Back in May of last year, he was stripped of his medical credentials. To recall:
In making the verdict on the sanctions, Dr Surendra Kumar, the panel's chairman, said Dr Wakefield had "brought the medical profession into disrepute" and his behaviour constituted "multiple separate instances of serious professional misconduct".That was the result after the General Medical Council found that he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research and "with callous disregard" for the children he conducted research on.
In total, he was found guilty of more than 30 charges.
Now, an investigative (not clinical) piece published in the British Medical Journal has elaborated on the Council's point by further exposing Wakefield:
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.In 2005, Wakefield founded an autism clinic in Texas (where he earned a $270K/year salary). He resigned after the Medical Council found him guilty (but before they stripped him of his credentials). As per usual, Wakefield is insisting he's innocent and that all of this is a witch hunt designed to quell anyone who questions vaccine safety.
"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."
[...]
"But perhaps as important as the scare's effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it," the BMJ editorial states.
Wakefield has been unable to reproduce his results in the face of criticism, and other researchers have been unable to match them. Most of his co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 after learning he had had been paid by a law firm that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers -- a serious conflict of interest he failed to disclose. After years on controversy, the Lancet, the prestigious journal that originally published the research, retracted Wakefield's paper last February.
The series of articles launched Wednesday are investigative journalism, not results of a clinical study. The writer, Brian Deer, said Wakefield "chiseled" the data before him, "falsifying medical histories of children and essentially concocting a picture, which was the picture he was contracted to find by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers and to create a vaccine scare."
According to BMJ, Wakefield received more than 435,000 pounds ($674,000) from the lawyers. Godlee said the study shows that of the 12 cases Wakefield examined in his paper, five showed developmental problems before receiving the MMR vaccine and three never had autism.
"It's always hard to explain fraud and where it affects people to lie in science," Godlee said. "But it does seem a financial motive was underlying this, both in terms of payments by lawyers and through legal aid grants that he received but also through financial schemes that he hoped would benefit him through diagnostic and other tests for autism and MMR-related issues."
A witch hunt, eh? Once again, let's review.
In 1998 a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published an article in the respected medical journal The Lancet. He did intestinal biopsies via colonoscopy on 12 children with intestinal symptoms and developmental disorders, 10 of whom were autistic, and found a pattern of intestinal inflammation. The parents of 8 of the autistic children thought they had developed their autistic symptoms right after they got the MMR vaccine. The published paper stated clearly: “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue.”Witch hunt. Sure. He'll be on Anderson Cooper tonight, vainly attempting to cover his ass.
Despite this disclaimer, Wakefield immediately held a press conference to say the MMR vaccine probably caused autism and to recommend stopping MMR injections. Instead, he recommended giving the 3 individual components separately at intervals of a year or more.[...]
Wakefield’s data was later discredited (more about that later) but even if it had been right, it wouldn’t have been good science. To show that intestinal inflammation is linked to autism, you would have to compare the rate in autistic children to the rate in non-autistic children. Wakefield used no controls. To implicate the MMR vaccine, you would have to show that the rate of autism was greater in children who got the vaccine and verify that autism developed after the shot. Wakefield made no attempt to do that.
His thinking was fanciful and full of assumptions. He hypothesized that measles virus damaged the intestinal wall, that the bowel then leaked some unidentified protein, and that said protein went to the brain and somehow caused autism. There was no good rationale for separating and delaying the components, because if measles was the culprit, wouldn’t one expect it to cause the same harm when given individually? As one of his critics pointed out: “Single vaccines, spaced a year apart, clearly expose children to greater risk of infection, as well as additional distress and expense, and no evidence had been produced upon which to adopt such a policy.”
Wakefield had been involved in questionable research before. He published a study in 1993 where he allegedly found measles RNA in intestinal biopsies from patients with Crohn’s disease (an inflammatory bowel disease). He claimed that natural measles infections and measles vaccines were the cause of that disease. Others tried to replicate his findings and couldn’t. No one else could find measles RNA in Crohn’s patients; they determined that Crohn’s patients were no more likely to have had measles than other patients, and people who had had MMR vaccines were no more likely to develop Crohn’s. Wakefield had to admit he was wrong, and in 1998 he published another paper entitled “Measles RNA Is Not Detected in Inflammatory Bowel Disease.” In a related incident, at a national meeting he stated that Crohn’s patients had higher levels of measles antibody in their blood. An audience member said that was not true — he knew because he was the one who had personally done the blood tests Wakefield was referring to. Wakefield was forced to back down.
In 2002, Wakefield published another paper showing that measles RNA had been detected in intestinal biopsies of patients with bowel disease and developmental disorders. The tests were done at Unigenetics lab. Actually, Wakefield’s own lab had looked for measles RNA in the patients in the 1998 study. His research assistant, Nicholas Chadwick, later testified that he had been present in the operating room when intestinal biopsies and spinal fluid samples were obtained and had personally tested all the samples for RNA with a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. The results were all negative, and he testified that Wakefield knew the results were negative when he submitted his paper to The Lancet. Chadwick had asked that his name be taken off the paper. So the statement in the paper that “virologic studies were underway” was misleading. Virologic studies had already been done in Wakefield’s own lab and were negative. Wakefield was dissatisfied with those results and went to Unigenetics hoping for a different answer.
Soon Wakefield’s credibility started to dissolve. The Lancet retracted his paper. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, described the original paper as “fatally flawed” and apologized for publishing it. [...]
Attempts to replicate Wakefield’s study all failed. Other studies showed that the detection of measles virus was no greater in autistics, that the rate of intestinal disease was no greater in autistics, that there was no correlation between MMR and autism onset, and that there was no correlation between MMR and autism, period.
In 2001 the Royal Free Hospital asked Wakefield to resign. In 2003, Brian Deer began an extensive investigation6 leading to an exposé in the The Sunday Times and on British television. In 2005 the General Medical Council (the British equivalent of state medical licensing boards in the U.S.) charged Wakefield with several counts of professional misconduct.
One disturbing revelation followed another. They discovered that two years before his study was published, Wakefield had been approached by a lawyer representing several families with autistic children. The lawyer specifically hired Wakefield to do research to find justification for a class action suit against MMR manufacturers. The children of the lawyer’s clients were referred to Wakefield for the study, and 11 of his 12 subjects were eventually litigants. Wakefield failed to disclose this conflict of interest. He also failed to disclose how the subjects were recruited for his study.
Wakefield was paid a total of nearly half a million pounds plus expenses by the lawyer. The payments were billed through a company of Wakefield’s wife. He never declared his source of funding until it was revealed by Brian Deer. Originally he had denied being paid at all. Even after he admitted it, he lied about the amount he was paid. Before the study was published, Wakefield had filed patents for his own separate measles vaccine, as well as other autism-related products. He failed to disclose this significant conflict of interest. Human research must be approved by the hospital’s ethics committee. Wakefield’s study was not approved. When confronted, Wakefield first claimed that it was approved, then claimed he didn’t need approval. Wakefield bought blood samples for his research from children (as young as 4) attending his son’s birthday party. He callously joked in public about them crying, fainting and vomiting. He paid the kids £5 each.
The General Medical Council accused him of ordering invasive and potentially harmful studies (colonoscopies and spinal taps) without proper approval and contrary to the children’s clinical interests, when these diagnostic tests were not indicated by the children’s symptoms or medical history. One child suffered multiple bowel perforations during the colonoscopy. Several had problems with the anesthetic. Children were subjected to sedation for other non-indicated tests like MRIs. Brian Deer was able to access the medical records of Wakefield’s subjects. He found that several of them had evidence of autistic symptoms documented in their medical records before they got the MMR vaccine. The intestinal biopsies were originally reported as normal by hospital pathologists. They were reviewed, re-interpreted, and reported as abnormal in Wakefield’s paper.
[While the post is about Andrew Wakefield, it's inevitable that the conversation in comments will also include the topic of vaccinations in-general. Thus, we have some commenting guidelines on this one: We realize there are varying views on vaccines among Shakers, and no opinion is off-limits in the discussion, but we request that people make sure they are using "I" language to express those opinions and not making sweeping generalizations. Let's keep this a civil conversation, please.]
Piers Morgan is a Man's Man, Man.
[Trigger warning for violence, homophobia]
There was a time when I confused the Cable News Network with some sort of gay ladies' tea party. [Hey! That gives me an idea...] That was before the release of CNN2: The Repiersing. (This Time it's Piersonal.):
[A screen capture of CNN.com, featuring teasers that "Piers Morgan can take a punch", and "Morgan makes famous people cry", along with a helpful reminder that Piers Morgan is CNN's newest talk show host.]
I don't get it. Am I supposed to trust Piers Morgan because he's a bully, or am I merely supposed to tune in for my one-and-only chance to see potentially violent hyper-masculinity?
As Liss pointed out, folks at CNN might be worried that Americans "won't be able to distinguish between 'British' and 'Big Fag'", hence the awesome new campaign.
Speaking of the word "awesome" and queer Brits, you know what I would pay money to see? Eddie Izzard interviewing a fucking squirrel. CNN? That would be, like, a hundred billion hot dogs of awesome.
Haiti One Year Later
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
Back in June, I mentioned an article in the New York Times that detailed how Haiti, in the aftermath of its devastating earthquake, had become what Malya Villard, the director of grass-roots survivor support org Kofaviv, described as "an ideal climate for rape."
Today, MSNBC reports:
A year after Haiti's devastating earthquake, women in Haiti's still-teeming tent cities face yet another threat: sexual violence. With little protection from community or law enforcement, many have been violently raped, only to become pregnant with their attackers' children.There aren't sufficient words to convey my rage and sadness.
Photojournalist Nadav Neuhaus traveled through Haiti's tent cities last summer, photographing and interviewing dozens of residents in the camps that still house more than 1 million people. During a visit to Camp La Piste, home to 50,000 displaced people, Neuhaus noticed an unusually high number of pregnant women. A community organizer and a local midwife confirmed his worries: Many of the women were pregnant as a result of rape.
...Fueled in part by these sexual attacks, the birth rate in Haiti has tripled since the quake, climbing from 4 percent to 12 percent, according to population experts.
Most women told Neuhaus they don't report the rapes, either out of shame or fear of repercussions. Even if they wanted to report the crimes, there's little help in a country where police and justice systems are destroyed or distracted and where resources for the powerless are almost non-existent.
In June, I also noted that Doctors Without Borders is treating survivors of brutal sexual assaults in Haiti. They provide "antibiotics for sexually transmitted diseases, anti-HIV treatment, pills for vaginitis, and over-the-counter painkillers," and, naturally, they are providing treatment to infants born in terrible conditions. You can donate to Doctors Without Borders here.
Top Chef Open Thread
[Image from a recent episode: Cheftestant Richard does some shit with nitrogen. For some reason.]
Last night's episode will be julienned in detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, pack your knives and go...
I Write Letters
Dear English-Speaking World:
I am officially requesting cessation of use of the truly abominable phrase "Man Up."
It is contemptible on so many levels that I would hardly know where to begin, had I the remotest inclination to explain everything that's wrong with it. Luckily, I don't. Suffice it to say, it sucks.
Please discontinue use effectively immediately.
With Womanly Regards,
Liss
