Vaccine fraud at the CDC?

Despite the vaccine makers thinking they had put the Wakefield controversy safely behind them, another researcher has uncovered an apparent link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and from the CDC’s own data:

Background
A significant number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder suffer a loss of previously-acquired skills, suggesting neurodegeneration or a type of progressive encephalopathy with an etiological basis occurring after birth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectof the age at which children got their first Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine on autism incidence. This is a reanalysis of the data set, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), used for the Destefano et al. 2004 publication on the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism diagnoses.

Methods
The author embarked on the present study to evaluate whether a relationship exists between child age when the first MMR vaccine was administered among cases diagnosed with autism and controls born between 1986 through 1993 among school children in metropolitan Atlanta. The Pearson’s chi-squared method was used to assess relative risks of receiving an autism diagnosis within the total cohort as well as among different race and gender categories.

Results
When comparing cases and controls receiving their first MMR vaccine before and after 36 months of age, there was a statistically significant increase in autism cases specifically among African American males who received the first MMR prior to 36 months of age. Relative risks for males in general and African American males were 1.69 (p=0.0138) and 3.36 (p=0.0019), respectively. Additionally, African American males showed an odds ratio of 1.73 (p=0.0200) for autism cases in children receiving their first MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age versus 24 months of age and thereafter.

The troubling thing here is that the author of the paper, “Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data” reached his conclusions by examining CDC data that reached the opposite conclusion and served as the basis for a CDC doctor’s testimony before Congress. Bill Sardi writes on Lew Rockwell:

There is evidence of an intentional cover-up as it is alleged that data
from children who did not have birth certificates (not a pertinent
factor) was removed from the study to reduce the statistical power of
the study and claim there was no significant association between autism
and the MMR vaccine…. Dr. Hooker notes that the CDC used children under the age of 3 for a
comparison (control) group, which is an intentional way of skewing
results of its studies involving any alleged link between vaccines and
autism.  Symptoms of autism generally don’t emanate among children till
after age 3 and the control group was too young to have received a
diagnosis of autism, he notes.

Not only does this “reanalysis of CDC data” reopen the possible MMR-autism link, but it calls into question the integrity of the entire field of vaccine research. If Hooker is correct and CDC doctors such as Dr. Colleen Boyle have engaged in vaccine fraud, it will entirely explode the basic assumption that vaccines are safe because it will render all of the CDC’s data and assurances suspect.

A few things

This isn’t actually the correct cover, but Emilio has translated both A Man Disrupted and Gravity Kills into Spanish and I just finished the ebook formatting for QUANTUM MORTIS La Gravedad Mata. So, if you speak fluent Spanish and would like to read over the two books and pass on any suggestions for improvement, I would appreciate it. I should have Un Hombre Disperso ready in a week or two as I’m hoping to release them in the company of another book or three come Labor Day Weekend. Shoot me an email with SPANISH in the subject if you’d like me to send you QM-LGM now and QM-UHD when it is ready.

In completely unrelated news, the six new members of the VPFL, as determined by RANDOM.ORG will be:

  1. Daniel
  2. Simon
  3. Vincent Castrillo
  4. Slamdunk
  5. Drew Deuce’s
  6. Jartstar

Please email me with VPFL in the subject so I can assign you a team and send you the league invitations.

Restoring Christendom

Lest you think it is not necessary to end the ill-considered concept of religious pluralism and repatriate the adherents of the religion of peace:

“If norwegian soldiers can take planes to Afghanistan, then Osama and Mohammed can also take planes to Norway, inshaAllah. Now, the government must wake up and assume responsibility, before this war spreads to Norway. Before the counterpart reacts. Before moslems take the step necessary.

Do not confuse the moslems’ silence with weakness. Do not profit from the moslems’ patience. Do not force us to do something that can be avoided. This is not a threat, only the words of truth. The words of justice.

A warning that the consequences can be fatal. A warning about a 9/11 on norwegian ground, or larger attacks than the one carried out on 22 july. This is for your own good and in your own best interest.’

We do not want to be a part of norwegian society. And we do not consider it necessary either to move away from Norway, because we were born and grew up here. And Allah’s earth belongs to everybody.

But let Grønland become ours. Bar this city quarter and let us control it the way we wish to do it. This is the best for both parts.

We do not wish to live together with dirty beasts like you.

Likewise. But Grønland is not theirs. Norway is not theirs. Does the West belong to them? Or does it belong to the Men of the West? Whether Norway realizes it or not, they are now actively engaged in a war of invasion and conquest. So is the rest of Europe. As is America. This is not a war that can be fought “over there”, it is a war that will have to be fought in every nation and every city across the West.

The War on Terror was a proxy and a cheap, cowardly one. The problem is that secular pluralism will not survive this challenge from Muslims. There is absolutely no point in appealing to secular pluralism, as it was always a fundamentally incoherent concept. It is only a matter of time before it is abandoned, and the sooner we return to the concept of Christian European nations, including the USA, the better off everyone will be.

Maximizing liberty does not encompass violence enforced partition and Sharia. We already know from the Israeli-Palestinian example what the results of that sort of partition will be. And we already know what the eventual solution will be.

Call to strip British citizenship from ‘traitors’ who fight for Isil. Britons who fight for Isil in Iraq and Syria should be considered traitors and stripped of their British citizenship, the former shadow home secretary has said. 

As the Norwegian example indicates, such actions will only be the start, which will eventually culminate in an eventual ban on Islam in most Western countries. There is already widespread support for such action, and it will grow rapidly with each new atrocity. Remember, the first Reconquista took 700 years. The second one won’t take as long, but it probably won’t be complete in our lifetimes either.

Trolls are not a problem

I found no little amusement in this article in the New York Times about dealing with online trolls. It always surprises me when I learn that other bloggers are genuinely upset by the weird little creatures who occasionally infest their blogs:

ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.

In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain.

The singular goal of the troll is to elicit pain? I don’t think that is entirely correct, but that is certainly one reason why we haven’t seen all that much troll activity here despite the considerable growth of traffic here. With the exceptions of the homosexual Tad and the literary critic Andrew Marston (who doesn’t have a job per se, but volunteers regularly at the New England Wildlife Center if you ever feel like giving him a call and discussing literature with him), most trolls have discovered that they can’t elicit anything more mild annoyance from me and thereby give up. Tad, Marston, Pox, and Obvious are a different variety, they are various forms of what might be described as the crusader-troll.

The crusader-troll attempts to DISQUALIFY DISQUALIFY the blogger by presenting alternate narratives to the blog readers. Hence we have Tad always trying to reframe the narrative with Vox as Pure Evil, Marston going to blogs far and wide to declare that Vox, Larry Correia, and Dan Simmons(?) are Terrible Writers, Pox/Ann openly trying to pick off readers in order to limit the extent of my baleful intellectual influence, and Obvious attempting to portray the mysterious “blogger” or “host” as Hypocritical, while the Scalzi fanboy Phoenician spent over a year attempting to show Vox as Inferior to the Object of Adoration. The fact that their disqualification attempts have obviously failed, as the blog traffic grew from 612,136 pageviews in August 2012 to over 1.5 million in August 2014 doesn’t ever seem to register with them. Perhaps they’re not trolling hard enough?

Of the crusading variety, I tend to find Marston the most amusing because I am aware I cause him far more pain than he causes me. (To say nothing of his fascinating attempts at fantasy fiction which are much more entertaining than all the 2014 Hugo winners combined. I even offered to publish Nocturne; it is guaranteed Hugo-Award winning material.) Every new Twitter follower I get, every additional 100k pageviews of traffic, and every new SF award for which I am nominated causes him pain. In fact, if he hadn’t gone on such an insane literary-snob rampage a while back and annoyed so many people, I very much doubt that Sad Puppies 2 would have been such a big success. Science fiction can thank Luscinia/Marston for the fact that Larry and I, among others, are bona-fide Hugo-nominated authors from now until the end of time. My author’s bio has been burnished thanks to the blog troll.

That, my friends, is what you call backfire. Well done, Andrew. But he will never learn because he is too neuro-atypical to grasp normal human psychology. He will continue to poke the bears because he has deemed the bears to be Evil, never understanding the wisdom implicit in the notion of letting sleeping grizzlies lie.

(That being said, it’s also amusing to me that my shadow troll, Ann Morgan aka Pox Vay, gets more traffic and comments than many blogs, and even has her own meta-troll, Obviously. This comment by her was downright funny too: “I also confess to being immature in some ways, mainly I lack confidence,
patience, and sometimes have poor control over my temper.” You don’t say.)

There will always be trolls. There are too many immature, attention-seeking, emotionally unstable individuals sans audiences for there not to be. But they are no reason for concern. Quite to the contrary, they are a material testament to the fact that you matter, that you are making a difference. I wouldn’t worry about trolls if I were the average blogger. I would worry more about having such a small audience, or so little of import to say, that the trolls feel no temptation to show up.

Kids know they’re smart

The smart guy from Khan Academy appears to be taking some unnecessary precautions:

The Learning Myth: Why I’m Cautious About Telling My Son He’s Smart

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Considering that his son started reading two years later than me, most of my high-IQ friends, and most of our children, I suspect Salman Khan can relax a bit. Anyhow, I always find this issue of “telling kids they’re smart or not” to be amusing. It’s exactly like debating whether to tell a kid he’s tall or not.

I mean, do you seriously think the kid is not going to notice? Especially if he is, in fact, actually smart? My parents never told me I was smart. It was just kind of hard not to notice when I was sitting there in kindergarten reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while the other kids were eating paste, licking the doorknobs, and urinating on themselves.

If Khan wants to make sure his son struggles, that’s easy enough. Throw some long division at him. Make him read in another language. Give him Cicero and Plato to read. In fairness, I don’t tell my son he’s smart, I just tell him to keep a straight face when his teammates lament the long division problems they’re struggling with, to help them out if they ask for it, and avoid ever letting them see the collection of alien hieroglyphics that pass for his math problems. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of his face when I introduced him to the “silent gh”.  He loved the “silent e”, but I’m 100 percent certain he thought I was screwing with him until I showed him a list of numbers that included a spelled-out “eight”.

The important thing is to teach the highly intelligent not to coast on their capabilities, not to mistake potential for achievement, and to show them how to respect the less-intelligent. Intellectual arrogance in a child is as natural and as innocent as athletic arrogance. It must be kept in check, but one can’t do that by pretending there is no reason for it to exist in the first place.

We don’t pretend that children don’t come in different shapes and sizes, and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t come with different cognitive capabilities as well. I also find it rather amusing that a guy with a five year-old thinks he has discovered secret of raising smart kids. Come back in thirteen years, sport, and we’ll see what you think you know.

Africa belongs to them

It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of the international do-gooder efforts in Africa for the last 100 years have not only been pointless, but were actually counterproductive:

Mob Destroys Ebola Center In Liberia Two Days After It Opens

A mob descended on the center at around 5:30 p.m., chanting, “No Ebola in West Point! No Ebola in West Point!” They stormed the front gate and pushed into the holding center. They stole the few gloves someone had donated this morning, and the chlorine sprayers used to disinfect the bodies of those who die here, all the while hollering that Ebola is a hoax.

They ransacked the protective suits, the goggles, the masks. They destroyed part of Tarplah’s car as he was fleeing the crowd. Jemimah Kargbo, a health care worker at a clinic next door, said they took mattresses and bedding, utensils and plastic chairs.

“Everybody left with their own thing,” she said. “What are they carrying to their homes? They are carrying their deaths.”

She said the police showed up but the crowd intimidated them.

“The police were there but they couldn’t contain them. They started threatening the police, so the police just looked at them,” she said.

And then mob left with all of the patients.

“They said, ‘The president says you have Ebola, but you don’t have Ebola, you have malaria. Get up and go out!’” Kargbo said.

The West is going to pull out of Africa sooner or later. Sooner, if the current Ebola epidemic is any indication. This means that Africa will be right back where it was in the 1940s, only now the African nations are unable to feed themselves because their populations have been massively inflated beyond what their maintainable infrastructure is able to support.

The only thing that the Western aid workers have been able to accomplish in the current crisis is bringing Ebola back to their native lands.

The end of comparative advantage

As I have repeatedly pointed out for several years, David Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage has been shown to be based upon false assumptions. Now the mainstream economists are beginning to recognize this:

David Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage has broken down after 200 years, or so I learned at the Lindau forum of Nobel laureates in Bavaria.

The theory published in 1817 has been a guiding principle of free trade, taken as a given by every student of economics in the modern era. It has served us well, but just as Newton’s theories ran into limits and were overtaken by Einstein’s relativity, comparative advantage no longer explains the world.

Under Ricardo’s model, inequality was supposed to narrow within countries as globalisation accelerated exponentially in the Nineties. Instead it is getting wider….

Ricardo described a world where free trade in goods was opening up, but
labour markets remained largely closed. This is no longer the case.
Globalisation bids up the wages of high-skilled engineers or software
analysts towards international levels wherever they live.

The Nobel laureates at Lindau aren’t willing to give up on globalization yet (although they should), but the cracks in the economic wall are showing as they express their fears that it is “going horribly wrong”. But it’s not going wrong. It’s going the only way it could possibly have gone.

Free trade is incompatible with national sovereignty. International
labor mobility is incompatible with the very existence of nations. And the heterogeneous populations are economically detrimental and a material barrier to the growth of capital and national wealth. I shall repeat my core argument against free trade, which I first articulated in 2012 following a quasi-debate with Gary North:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent
form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the
free movement of capital and labor as well. (The “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when
because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global
international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and
based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal
differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty,
democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of
independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own
laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign,
democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese,
German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and
distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

What is this, hockey?

Ender came home from soccer practice the other day with mixed news. On the plus side, he was the youngest player to make the team at the elite level for which he is now eligible. Most of the players from his last year’s team are now out of the sport or transferring to lesser clubs. On the downside, he reported that he’d lost his first fight, although besides being slightly wild-eyed he didn’t look any the worse for wear to me.

I don’t tend to get worked up over the occasional fracas since there is a definite “boys will be boys” attitude here, but I was furious when he told me the details, as he was jumped before practice by a bigger kid two years older, who kicked him in the face from behind while Ender was passing the ball back-and-forth with a teammate. A second kid, also older, then grabbed him around the neck when he whirled around and tried to hold him back for the first kid to punch. Ender took a few shots to the face and got a bloody nose out of it, but in the process he managed to bloody the first kid’s nose by kicking him in the face, and messed up the second kid’s leg by raking his shin and kicking his knee with his heel.

The kid with whom Ender had been passing the ball tried to intervene, but was flattened for his trouble, until finally the star of the team, who is more than a bit of an athletic specimen, jumped in and punched the two kids off Ender to break things up. The strange thing is that the two kids are new to the club and Ender didn’t know either of them. So, my suspicion is that they were trying to assert themselves by picking on the youngest kid, who unfortunately carries himself with misleading body language that tends to lead aggressors to believe he is an easier target than is in fact the case. Alternatively, there are some girls who have made it eminently clear that they like him, and I’m wondering if that might have something to do with it.

Anyhow, as I pointed out, it was much more of a draw than a loss, because the second kid’s knee was too badly hurt to permit him to practice, so he went home, and then after practice, the first kid challenged Ender in front of the others, then, when Ender indicated his willingness to reopen hostilities on equal terms, backed down. Besides being fairly tough after three years of judo, Ender is now as tall as I am, and while he doesn’t have much mass to him yet, the kid is ripped. However, he doesn’t have much in the way of strike training yet, which is an oversight I intend to rectify.

Ender was vastly amused, however, by my initial reaction, as well as the reaction of the two Dragons I told about it, as we were uniformly focused on the tactical situation. Besides ambuscades and kicking high, the kid apparently likes to grab the neck with his left, pull his victim forward, and then throw punches with his right hand. So, we went over obliquing and arm bars, as well as the catch, lift, and twist routine for dealing with kickers. If the kid does manage to close, rather than trying to pull away, move in, cover up with one elbow, and work the ribs until he pulls away, then switch to elbows and knees. It’s with some difficulty that I’m going to leave matters up to Ender at his request rather than complain to the club, but if the kid is dumb enough to attack Ender again, I very much doubt he’s coming out of it without a broken arm and possibly a few broken ribs.

One of the hard things as a father is learning when you can step in and take care of a problem for your son and when you have to step back and let him take care of his own business. As much as I’d love to put the fear of me into the little bastard (as in The Dark Knight and “SWEAR TO ME”) and I have no doubt that I could, I have to step back here.

Now, I think turning the other cheek is important. I have even done it on occasion, once when I was perfectly within my rights to break the other individual’s jaw. And Ender has been very good about making peace with past assailants; he’s quite friendly now with the oversized kid who caused him trouble last season. But there is a time for peace and there is a time for war. This would appear to be one of the latter.

On a happier note, Ender is beginning his professional refereeing career this weekend, and I’ll have the opportunity to be there since my team will be one of the two sides playing. I have already explained to him that it is bad form, and more than a little unwise, to blow the offsides whistle on any attacking player who has the power to decide the referee’s bedtime.

Two TIA reviews

Because it has been a long time since The Irrational Atheist was published, because my refutation of the “religion causes war” argument has been widely accepted, and because Richard Dawkins has increasingly rendered himself a parody of his former public persona, it’s easy to forget that the core arguments remain timeless. Here are a pair of recent reviews of the book, the first by a Christian, the second by an atheist. If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to consider picking up a copy sometime. 

Trench Warfare. Acerbic and Funny

I bought this the first time I saw it on a shelf in hardcover. I rarely ever buy books on impulse, but this was one of those times. It sat on my shelf for about six years, however. Finally, I had the time to delve into it. The Irrational Atheist is a direct response to “new” atheism that is unlike most other responses (most other significant responses being quite a bit more respectful than Day’s). If you enjoy reading about theological, moral and social issues AND sarcasm, well this book is for you.

Day focuses his arguments in the very thick of the new atheist’s claims. Christian apologists and philosophers have rarely taken these guys seriously, mostly because none of them (except Dennett) deserve to be taken seriously in the realm of philosophy. And while the response of the apologists has been necessary for the churches to hear, none have really focused on some of the “lower” issues. By this I mean issues such as whether or not atheism is gaining converts in the U. S., whether or not religion ‘causes’ war, whether atheists are smarter than non-atheists, whether religion stifles science, etc.

From knowing nothing of Vox Day other than what he has written in his book it’s very obvious that he’s an intelligent man. Imagine Dennis Miller writing a book in response to the new atheists and you will kind of get a glimpse at the wit and humor that comprise this work. These issues of history and social issues seem to be his strong point and he handles them with brilliance. The heart of the book includes detailed chapters into his personal beefs with each of these writers. My guess would be he has the least respect for Sam Harris and the most for Dennett, but Hitchens would be neck and neck with Harris.

The last few chapters discuss various other related issues: the Holocaust, Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, human sacrifice, atheism’s responsibility for the destruction of millions of lives, a chapter on some of the theological arguments used by these writers and an appendix of a discussion between the author and Socrates concerning the Euthyphro dilemma.

If this topic interests you I heartily recommend this be on your shelf. As I said, most Christian apologists or philosophers answer via way of philosophy or theological correction or biblical defenses, all of which are very important. Day prefers to get down in the trenches and battle them head-on, via some literary lex talionis. Not for the faint of heart.

This atheist loves the book. Logical refutations (finally!) of atheist talking points.

I am an atheist, and I really like this book. Vox Day’s style is a
direct and a refreshing relief from wheelbarrow loads of empty
platitudes. To summarize the book: “God loves you, but I don’t. Here’s why blindly following the high priests of atheism is stupid.”

The author says (paraphrasing, don’t remember exact phrasing): “This
book isn’t to convert you or argue in favor of God. I don’t care at all
if you believe or not. This book is to demolish the atheist arguments.”

Although
there is no chance I’m going to be converting to Catholicism, or any
other sky deity religions, I have to applaud the hard logical reasoning
and fresh insights as Vox takes a hammer to the arguments of Hitchens,
Dawkins & Harris. It’s a refreshing change from all the arguments
that boil down to “God exists, therefore God exists”.

That’s a fair summary. And before the Churchians leap in to wag their fingers, I will readily admit that my failure to love everyone is indicative of my imperfect Christianity. I’m also not particularly good on turning the other cheek, avoiding impure thoughts, and avoiding the use of rough language. But I fail to see that blatantly lying and erecting a false veneer of superficial spiritual perfection would be an improvement upon the open and honest expression of my thoughts and feelings on various matters.