Belgian snow leopard baby.
How the media can help prevent another Cumbria
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.
What lies behind the Israeli attack?
The core problem in resolving the Israeli Apartheid is that this is the liberal option:
I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian. I’m not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state.”
There may be Israeli’s who genuinely want to end Apartheid, just like there were White South Africans who wanted to end theirs, but they’re too few and too powerless to count, unless Israel starts to suffer for its policies the way South Africa suffered. Hence the importance of the boycott and disinvestment campaign as well as the aid offered to the Palestinian population.
Which is part of the reason why the relief flottila was attacked the way it was, as Jim Henley explains:
Simply, the Jewish people have historically been weak. The Israeli state is currently strong. It’s the only military power of significance in its region and it has the apparently unswerving support of the only global military power that matters. Israel attacked the relief convoy because Israel did not want the relief convoy reaching Gaza, and the convoy offered an opportunity to demonstrate that it meant what it said. In particular that it wasn’t going to stand on ceremony about technicalities like “international waters†or “attacking civilians.†It’s not more complcated than that.
As I said before, Israel wanted to make it clear that they and only they would decide when the population of Gaza had suffered enough and was allowed help.
Meanwhile, here’s what happens if you attempt to protest this attack in the Occupied Westbank:
A 21-year old American student at Cooper Union lost an eye after getting hit in the face with a tear gas projectile fired by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration at a crowded checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank yesterday. Emily Henochowicz (here’s her blog) was part of a group protesting the deaths of at least nine pro-Palestinian activists aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. According to her fellow activists, Henochowicz is undergoing surgery to remove her left eye, and one protester, Sören Johanssen, says Israeli soldiers intentionally fired at her face:
“They clearly saw us,” says Johanssen. “They clearly saw that we were internationals and it really looked as though they were trying to hit us. They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.” Israeli soldiers have previously killed and injured demonstrators with tear gas canisters.
QotD: If Israeli PR went freelance
It’s time the Israeli government’s PR team made the most of its talents, and became available for hire. Then whenever a nutcase marched into a shopping mall in somewhere like Wisconsin and gunned down a selection of passers-by, they could be on hand to tell the world’s press “The gunman
regrets the loss of life but did all he could to avoid violence.” Then various governments would issue statements saying “All we know is a man went berserk with an AK 47, and next to him there’s a pile of corpses, so until we know the facts we can’t pass judgement on what took place.”
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.