But probably won’t. From Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe. To ask why he did it is to ask the wrong question; learning his reasons, if any, won’t stop somebody else from deciding they need to go start shooting people; his motivations won’t be theirs. Far better than to endlessly speculate this way, the media needs to follow the advice in the video above.
Media
Wakefield: goat milk as measles vaccine
A week or so ago I posted about Andrew “MMR is bad okay” Wakefield being struck off the medical register and mentioned in passing that he himself had patented a single measles vaccine, to se in place of the MMR vaccine that was supposed to be causing autism in children. He therefore wasn’t just doing bad research with questionable results to reach false conclusions, he seemed to be doing it out of a financial motive. Nobody needs a single measles vaccine if the MMR vaccine is available and safe, after all. What I didn’t realise was just how quacky Wakefield’s patents were:
Wakefield’s patent application’s description of the production of his transfer factor product makes startling reading.
[…]
So, we have measles virus and mice. Then we have the mice lymphocytes and a human cell line. Then more measles virus, for some reason. Then goats, and the final product coming from the colostrum of the nanny-goat. The route of administration described in the patent application is oral, but intramuscular injection is also referred to. There is description of reactions of human patients to this preparation, but absolutely no hint of any of the normal drug testing procedures that would have to be undertaken for any product to be licensed as a safe and effective therapeutic agent. Really, read the original text. It’s a classic example of junk science.
Just how happy should concerned parents be to have something like this injected into their children? Mice? Human bone marrow? Goat’s milk? Measles virus involved in the production process? Absolutely no background literature supporting the process, and no evidence of any safety or efficacy testing?
From the start then, even before he did his notorious “research”, Wakefield seemed to have been deeply involved in pseudoscience and quackery. How than was it possible for the press to take him serious for so long that the safety of the MMR vaccine was actually in doubt, if not amongst medical practitioners, at least amongst the “informed” lay audience, for years? It’s one thing to understand and know that science reporting in general is woefully inadequate almost everywhere. Quite another to know it’s so bad as this, that an obvious quack as Wakefield has turned out to be was believed and barely investigated.
Hands up who likes Ian Hislop
Not Tim Ireland, for understandable reasons:
Iain Dale actually tried to take political advantage of my being smeared as a paedophile while simulataneously libelling Tom Watson as a smear merchant. He went on to similarly exploit a man on the brink of suicide and the repeated publication of my home address. He did this primarily by lying about the context, the circumstances and the specifics of attempts to contact him about these matters, falsely giving the impression that he had made a valid complaint of harassment (which quickly evolved into an outright claim of ‘stalking’) and it was your man Adam Macqueen who popped up at the crucial moment on the website of another Private Eye writer, Louis Barfe, likening my correspondence with your magazine to the rantings of a “nutter on a bus”.
Tim has had a long and horrible smear campaign aimed at him in which Private Eye was a bit player, reacting to false information as I understand it and refusing to correct their mistakes since then. This started a longer discussion on various English lefty blogs about the general merits of the magazine. First Jamie:
I kind of gave up on it a while back. Not so much that, maybe, but I just lost interest in its contents. A lot of the gossip and such in it increasingly seemed to be driven by entirely private rivalries and vendettas. That was probably always the case, but I get the impression that the unloading of the silver handled bucket used to be postponed until it at least had some contents. In a way, that connects to Tim’s grievances. The Eye was always something of an in-group. Now it’s nothing much else.
Hislop’s glory years were the 80s and early 90s, when “Have I Got News For You” was in its early days and when he finally drove Punch into the ground and gained the monopoly on British satirical news. Now … well, now he is Punch, isn’t he? Lots of tired in-jokes, the same bunch of cronies editing the thing, imperceptibly shifting into a bunch of old blokes harrumphing at each other in a saloon bar. Basically, Top Gear for people who can’t drive.
but it was splinty who struck the cruelest blow:
On reflection, perhaps D2 is a bit harsh in saying that the Eye has transmogrified into Punch. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a decompression chamber for Oldie readers looking for something a bit more sedate.
Ouch…
Your daily NYT shovel of steaming bullshit
The New York Times has always been an active cheerleader for mendacious or false stories about Democratic candidates, usually staying just short of outright lying, if only through allowing third parties to lie for them, followed up by halfassed denounciations. But their smear campaign against senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal crosses that line completely. Their story is that Blumenthal, who served in the Marine Reserves during the War on Vietnam, but not in that war itself and who has been a staunch supporter of war veteran causes, has been fibbing about his service to create the impression that he did go to ‘Nam:
But what is striking about Mr. Blumenthal’s record is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events.
Sometimes his remarks have been plainly untrue, as in his speech to the group in Norwalk. At other times, he has used more ambiguous language, but the impression left on audiences can be similar.
Along the article they provide video fotoage of a speech in which Blumenthal says he was in Vietnam”, specifically “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam”. But they don’t provide the whole video, which soon makes it clear that actually, apart from that quoted sentence he makes quite clear he served during, not in Vietnam. And if Blumenthal was so eager to fudge his record, you’d also expect him to mention it during the recent Democratical senatorial debate, but no:
The original story has been followed up with several new stories and editorials, none of which bring new evidence for the NYT’s allegations, but which do keep repeating them. The effect wasn’t long in common, with Blumenthal’s lead over likely Republican opponents dropping quickly after the original story was published. Pushback from the campaign as well as bloggers, once it became clear how false the story was has been fierce, but the paper stands by its now disproven accusations:
The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal’s long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with The Times. Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.
The video doesn’t change our story. Saying that he served “during Vietnam” doesn’t indicate one way or the other whether he went to Vietnam.
Local reporters meanwhile — the ones actually in Connecticut having followed Blumenthal for years — are puzzled over these allegations:
So I asked reporters, anchors and columnists to tell me (a) whether they could remember Blumenthal ever claiming to have served in Vietnam and (b) whether they had been under the impression for whatever reason, that Blumenthal had served in Vietnam. Here are the answers so far.
Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror, who may have covered Blumenthal more often than anybody else, referred me to his quote in an NPR national story: “Every time he talked about his military record, he was quite clear that he had been a military reservist and never came close to suggesting he was in Vietnam.”
Greg Hladky of the Hartford Advocate, formerly of the New Haven Register and Bridgeport Post, right up there with Paz in Blumenthal coverage: “Never personally heard [Blumenthal] say he was in Vietnam. I knew he had been the the Marine Corps Reserve, talked about that briefly during interview for a profile I did recently, and he never mentioned being in Nam.”
It goes on like that, with half a dozen or so prominent local journalists saying that, no, they never got the impression served in ‘Nam, knocking the stuffing out of the idea that Blumenthal consistently lied about his service. The question remains why the New York Times went for this smear campaign on such slender evidence. Smearing happens all the times, but usually a supposedly unbiased newspaper like the NYT is careful not to be too transparant…
MPAA: objectively pro-terrorist
The MPAA fights the hardest battle of all against torrenting soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan:
One of the questions posed by the MPAA is whether they have banned U.S. troops from going to stores that sell pirated DVDs. The Central Command answered this question negatively, as it would hurt the business of Iraqi salesmen.
“No….banning our troops from visiting these shops would have the unwelcome secondary effect of harming Iraqi entrepreneurs selling legitimate goods.†They add that there is nothing they can do about DVDs that are being sold on Iraqi property because these stores fall under Iraqi law.
[…]
Pirated DVDs are not the only worry for the MPAA as more recently military personnel have also been using BitTorrent to access U.S. entertainment on foreign bases. A military insider told TorrentFreak that they see no other option than to ‘pirate’, as the entertainment industry gives them little opportunity to enjoy digital media legally.
“We have sent letters to the RIAA and the MPAA repeatedly letting them know that our downloads are a direct representation of their failure to allow us to be good consumers as others in the US can be,†our military insider explained.
Instead of holding out a helping hand to deployed soldiers, the entertainment industries continue to treat them as criminals. On a daily basis, the MPAA and RIAA send copyright notices to military personnel via their base ISPs. In turn, the personnel are threatened with account suspension and in serious cases, disconnection.
Not to get too sanctimoniously outraged on behalve of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they shouldn’t be there anyway, but it’s typical of the respect these soldiers are hold in by the companies that made billions of these wars… If you’re a soldier, you’re a sucker.