Crime
pharyngula | January 5, 2011The 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…
pharyngula | December 13, 2010At 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…
pharyngula | October 24, 2010I'm seeing the news popping up everywhere now that the Richard Dawkins Foundation is suing Josh Timonen for fraud and embezzlement. The central fact of the story is that Timonen has been accused of diverting 92% of the revenues from the RDF store to his own personal use.
There's not much that can be said. Richard Dawkins and the RDF are going to be rightly silent on the case. Josh Timonen has unwisely commented, while failing to refute the major facts of the accusation. I'm not going to say much myself, because while I liked Josh personally, the case against him looks awfully damning. But it…
pharyngula | October 8, 2010The Berkeley County jail in South Carolina has a terrifying policy:
Our inmates are only allowed to receive soft back bibles in the mail directly from the publisher. They are not allowed to have magazines, newspapers, or any other type of books.
First thought: I'd die if I were arrested in Berkeley County.
Second thought: it says something about the county that they've had this policy for years, and are only now moving on one complaint made in 2008. The comments section on the article is enlightening, too — apparently, prisoners ought to be digging ditches, not reading, and if we let them…
pharyngula | September 11, 2010That's the usual excuse we here from defenders of Catholicism — that the accusations of pedophilia and sexual abuse are only the work of a tiny minority of rotten people. I can accept that it's a small minority that are the actual perpetrators, but the culture of the church protects its own…and the privileged, special, precious people aren't the congregation, it's the priesthood.
Belgium has plumbed the depths of its own local apple barrel, and made a horrifying discovery.
"We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members," the commission…
pharyngula | September 7, 2010Two children are missing in Belize, and no one knows what happened to them. So a helpful 'psychic' declared that they had been fed to the crocodiles in a nearby sanctuary. The results were predictable.
Reports are that the mob shot and killed some of the 17 crocs held in captivity at the sanctuary. Also destroyed were the Rose's two story home that included a laboratory and nursery for baby crocs. One baby American Crocodile was to be flown to Chicago to the Wildlife Discovery Center in Lake Forest, Ill. USA for the first ever animal exchange program between Belize and the USA. Over $2,500 in…
pharyngula | September 6, 2010Gregory Koger is an ex-con and a revolutionary communist…and none of that should matter in the slightest. He's also a person who was beat up, handcuffed, maced, arrested, and now faces the prospect of a three year jail sentence for the crime of holding up his iPhone to take pictures of police harrassment. Koger is the young man who was documenting Sunsara Taylor's protest of the behavior of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (which, by the way, ought to change their name to drop the first word), and who, oddly, was manhandled and arrested for taking videos of the event, while Taylor…
pharyngula | September 1, 2010Already, deranged Discovery Institute shill David Klinghoffer is blaming the hostage-taking nut James Lee's actions on Darwinism.
Witness the recent examples of Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn, Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris, Jokela High School shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen. Historical figures who drew inspiration, if indirectly, from Darwinian theory include Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. I've written about this many times before and received much abuse for it, not least when I took up the theme on the…
pharyngula | August 4, 2010Gullibility really does destroy lives. A Vietnamese couple in Australia, the Trans, were missing a purse, so they made mistake #1: they went to a fortune teller to find out where it was. Really, magic doesn't work.
Mistake #2: the fortune teller told them that a young woman, Leilani dos Santos, who was living with them had stolen it. The fortune teller had no way of knowing, but made this potentially destructive accusation anyway.
Mistake #3: The Trans believed the fortune teller.
Mistake #4, and this is the really big one: The Trans believed that torture was an appropriate method of getting…
pharyngula | July 27, 2010This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It's got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife.
But there's an odd disjoint here, too. It's the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.
The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be…
pharyngula | July 27, 2010Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering.
The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.
There are pictures at the link. It's not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I'd have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna's parents! They have a special treatment plan.
The Wylands and their church reject medical care in…
pharyngula | July 20, 2010There's a devious web site called "I write like…" that is making the rounds — you paste in some of your text, and it claims to analyze it and tell you what famous writer you resemble. I, for instance, am a combination of Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, and HP Lovecraft. How flattering! Unfortunately, it's garbage code that plucks out a few random parameters and hands you back a big name author.
Who would do such a thing, and why? You will not be surprised to learn that it is a front for a vanity publisher. Hey, you write like Shakespeare — give me money and we'll publish your book!
pharyngula | July 6, 2010Father Kevin Gray had better things to do with his time.
Apparently for the past seven years Gray has been spending church money to fund trips to New York and pay for sessions with male escorts, and he also racked up $200,000 in restaurant bills including a large tab at Tavern on the Green.
It is a step up for the church, from child molesters to hedonistic embezzlers. Progress!
pharyngula | July 5, 2010This is a horrific story out of India, and the weird thing is that everyone is condemning the bloody, violent end of the story, but treating the preliminaries as a matter of course. Here's the outline, as near as I can extract from a scattering of stories, often in poor English.
In March, TJ Joseph, a professor at a private Catholic college in Kerala, gave an exam that apparently offended Muslim students. Here's the only description of the awful exam question I could find:
The indicted questionnaire however did not include anything that could be construed as against the Muslim religion. The…
pharyngula | June 3, 2010I'm sure many readers here are fans of Thomas Kinkade — how could we not love a hack who used his pious Christianity to woo franchises into paying him buckets of money to sell his kitsch? — so you may be saddened to learn that his Signature Gallery stores are dying like starving puppies and he's being successfully sued for million dollar judgments to such a degree that some of his companies are declaring bankruptcy. You'll be appalled to hear that some people are saying rude things about him.
"Kinkade is a ... deadbeat," said their lawyer, Norman Yatooma, who accused the artist and his Los…
pharyngula | May 28, 2010Bill Donohue will be so relieved. Here's a story about a youn girl being raped, her assailant protected by the church, and the girl herself getting all the blame…and it's the Baptists! Tina Anderson was raped by Ernest Willis, a Trinity Baptist Church member, when she was 15, and got pregnant. She accused Willis in the church, and here's what happened:
When the pastor heard Anderson's allegations, he told her that if she had "lived in the Old Testament," she would have been stoned to death for not reporting the attack sooner.
"He also said I had 'allowed myself to be put in a compromising…
pharyngula | May 24, 2010Andrew Wakefield has been found guilty of more than 30 charges of medical misconduct and has been struck off the role of medical practitioners in Great Britain. I'm sure he's not hurting, though: his celebrity friends will love him more, and his price for speaking engagements has no doubt just shot up as a consequence of being able to add 'martyr' after his name.
He'll have to stop doing children's birthday parties, though.
And the panel hearing the case took exception with the way he gathered blood samples. Dr Wakefield paid children £5 for the samples at his son's birthday party.
Worst.…
grrlscientist | July 15, 2009tags: TEDTalks, environment, cities, poverty, crime, underground economy, Stewart Brand, streaming video
The man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate. You've GOT to watch the video of the train going through the poor part of town in Bankok -- it's amazing! [16:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED…
bioephemera | June 10, 2009One of the challenges we faced with our new blogosphere initiative, Silence is the Enemy, was how to mobilize people to do something about the plight of rape victims. It's not that people don't have empathy for rape victims; it's that the experience of living in a war-torn nation where rape and murder are routine facts of life is so foreign and horrifying to us, we tend to tune it out. Part of the way to deal with this is to give people a clear mission - something simple they can do; in our case, donating to Doctors without Borders (as I am for the month of June), or writing to Congress, or…
bioephemera | June 1, 2009
A sexual violence victim recovers in Goma, Congophoto by Endre Vestvik
A few weeks ago, the NYT published a horrifying account by Nicholas Kristof of the pervasive sexual violence left over from Liberia's civil war. A major survey in Liberia found that 75% of Liberian women had been raped - most gang-raped. And many of the victims are children:
Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes…