Tag: law

MMR caused this case of autism

Ever notice that science fetishists love to point to the courts when it suits them, then quickly reverse course and point out that that the law isn’t science when it doesn’t?

At nine months old, Valentino Bocca was as bright as a button. In a favourite family photo, taken by his father, the baby boy wriggles in his mother’s arms and laughs for the camera. His parents look at the precious picture often these days. It is a reminder of their only son before they took him on a sunny morning to the local public health clinic for a routine childhood vaccination.

Valentino was never the same child after the jab in his arm. He developed autism and, in a landmark judgment, a judge has ruled that his devastating disability was provoked by the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The case of Valentino Bocca age nine from Rimini Italy has reignited the debate over a possible link between the MMR and autism after a judge ruled his disability was provoked by the jab.

The judgment in a provincial Italian court challenges the settled view of the majority of the medical profession — and could have profound implications in Britain and across the world. Valentino’s parents, Antonella, 44, and Maurizio, 43, have been awarded £140,000, to be paid by Italy’s Ministry of Health and they plan a civil action against the Italian government that may get them £800,000 more…. The judge’s view has since been endorsed by Italy’s High Court of Law (the equivalent of our Supreme Court) which ruled that the Italian government must pay compensation to children damaged by any jabs given under the Ministry of Health auspices — even if they are not compulsory ones.

The problem faced by the pro-vaccine camp is twofold. First, what passes for the science on this issue is dreadful and really should not be described as science. The same scientific community that didn’t hesitate to give syphilis to black men and performed experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees is suddenly claiming that it would be terribly unethical to allow children to remain unvaccinated or even push back the vaccine schedule a few months in order to gather meaningful scientific evidence on the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Statistical surveys of populations are not proper science, and furthermore, have absolutely nothing to do with whether one individual will be negatively affected by a vaccine or not.

The constant bleating that “no scientific evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism” has been found is so irrelevant and misleading as to be dishonest. I doubt there is any scientific evidence between a punch in the nose and death either, but there is no question that people have been killed by a single punch before because people have seen it happen. For some reason, the process of simple observation that everyone believes is perfectly reliable when one person punches another in the face suddenly becomes not only unreliable, but downright anti-scientific when one person injects various foreign substances into a child. I have personally witnessed an infant scream and immediately collapse into unconsciousness when given a shot, and I absolutely defy any moronic scientist to claim it was not the result of the vaccine being administered. Fortunately, there were no ill effects apparent after the infant regained consciousness, but after witnessing that, I would no sooner permit any child of mine to be vaccinated at such a young age than I would permit someone to hit me in the head with a hammer… no matter how many statistical surveys are presented by scientists claiming that there is no scientific evidence showing any link between being hit in the head with a hammer and autism.

Second, the legal standard is “beyond a reasonable degree of doubt”. And it is well beyond a reasonable degree of doubt that certain vaccines have caused autism in some children. Very few vaccine skeptics are saying that no children can be vaccinated against anything or that all vaccines are intrinsically evil – although the whole fetal tissue thing on which some vaccines are based is, quite clearly, evil on its face – but most parents are not complete idiots incapable of recognizing when their normal child suddenly loses speech and motor abilities that it previously possessed, or linking it to probable causes. In fact, the awareness that vaccines are, beyond any reasonable degree of doubt, responsible for autism and other damage is precisely why Congress passed a law removing vaccine makers and administrators from legal liability.

It is far beyond the current state of biological science to claim one particular administration of a vaccine did not cause one specific case of autism and any honest scientist would admit it. Can you imagine if other culpable parties began to try defending themselves using the “no scientific link” defense? Science simply doesn’t work that way, especially “science” that is nothing more than statistical analysis, and those who attempt to appeal to science in such fashion are guilty of dishonesty, empty propaganda, and the abuse of science.

Anyhow, this is a welcome outcome and I hope that the threat of being financially ruined by their victims will force Big Pharma to spend more effort in improving the safety of their products than in lobbying the various governments to mandate more vaccines and providing them with additional protection from liability. Science is not the law, nor should it ever be confused for it. We don’t need scientists to determine if a specific vaccine has harmed a specific individual any more than we need them to determine if a specific individual has robbed a specific bank, in fact, scientists should not be involved in the legal discussion at all given their shoddy faux-science and oft-demonstrated biases on the matter.

Egyptian spring!

Fortunately, Facebook and other social media are far more powerful than mere militaries. Right?

Egypt’s highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country’s interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority, triggering a new level of chaos and confusion in the country’s leadership. The Supreme Constitutional Court found that all articles making up the law that regulated parliamentary elections are invalid, said Showee Elsayed, a constitutional lawyer.

It’s not as if the USA is in a position to throw any stones here. The new Egyptian military government is no less illegitimate than Mr. Soetoro. Regardless of whether they decided it rightly or wrongly, at least Egypt’s Supreme Court is willing to consider the question of whether the elected officials are valid or not.

Inequality before the law

As with homogamy, one of the real purposes behind eliminating the statute of limitations for child abuse has nothing to do with the purported ones, as it is intended to specifically target and damage the Church.

While the first criminal trial of a Roman Catholic church official accused of covering up child sexual abuse has drawn national attention to Philadelphia, the church has been quietly engaged in equally consequential battles over abuse, not in courtrooms but in state legislatures around the country.

The fights concern proposals to loosen statutes of limitations, which impose deadlines on when victims can bring civil suits or prosecutors can press charges. These time limits, set state by state, have held down the number of criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against all kinds of people accused of child abuse — not just clergy members, but also teachers, youth counselors and family members accused of incest.

Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether, and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter how long after the alleged abuse occurred….

In New York, the Catholic bishops said they would support a modest increase in the age of victims in criminal or civil cases, to 28. But their lobbying, along with that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, has so far halted proposals that would allow a one-year window for civil suits for abuses from the past. The bishops say the provision unfairly targets the church because public schools, the site of much abuse, and municipalities have fought successfully to be exempted.

Now, I don’t have any problem with making it easier for genuine victims of child abuse to confront those who victimized them and receive reparations, but it is reprehensible to do so on the basis of the employer of the criminally culpable individual. This is a gross violation of the increasingly nonexistent concept of equality before the law; why should teachers and government employees be provided a free pass on molesting children?

It would appear this is because the state governments don’t want to be held financially responsible for the actions of their employees, and while they can often get away with excusing criminal behavior under the guise of it being committed in the exercise of the state employee’s duties, it’s not presently credible to claim that anyone’s occupational duties require the commission of sexual abuse. So, the Church is expected to pay for the misdeeds of its priests, but the state intends to exempt itself from paying for the misdeeds of its teachers and other employees.

The potential problem in this is that if the state governments are permitted to get away with this two-tiered law concerning past crimes, there is no reason they cannot extend it to cover present ones as well. After all, the logic is identical, as exempting teachers and state employees from responsibility for the sexual abuse of children would also reduce the financial liability of the state and local governments.

WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave

No-Limit, No-Case Nigga

Upon perusing the evidence, Alan Dershowitz concludes Trayvon Martin already received his due justice:

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. Moreover, the New York Times has reported that traces of marijuana were found in Trayvon Martin’s body and that Martin’s father initially said that the voice crying for help was not that of his son. It is also been reported that a bruise was found on Martin’s ring finger that would be consistent with Martin having punched Zimmerman. No other wounds, aside of course from the fatal bullet hole in the front of Martin’s body, were found.

If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

This is hardly a surprise. I haven’t written much about this since I didn’t see any reason to doubt, from the beginning, that given a choice between a white guy who wasn’t a white guy doing Neighborhood Watch in a relatively high crime neighborhood and an innocent Skittles-bearing African child who referred to himself as “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA”, the core situation was anything more than a simple matter of a predatory African attacking someone. The only genuinely unusual thing about it is that in the interests of self-preservation, most predatory Africans have the good sense to limit their attacks to Europeans, Hispanics, and other Africans who are incapable of self-defense. Like all predators who wish to survive, they focus on the sick and the weak. The No-Limit Nigga didn’t abide by those sensible limits of predation and that is why his case, such as it is, has been presented post-mortem.

The African community in America, abetted by the mainstream media, has completely missed a potentially important teachable moment. Instead of attempting to media-lynch a decent Hispanic man who was merely attempting to protect his neighborhood, they would have done much better to teach their young men that in a nation with millions of concealed-carry permit holders, and millions more who carry without bothering with permits, it is not merely criminal, but criminally stupid, to attack even the most apparently indefensible individual. Instead, the well-publicized violence of the idiotic “Justice for Trayvon” attacks has only ensured that even more people will be carrying weapons and they will show even less hesitation about using them when attacked in the future.

In fact, the one thing I did find surprising about Zimmerman is that he only shot Martin once. That alone should have sufficed to prove that he had no intention of killing Martin. I was always taught to fire an automatic three times, starting low and progressing upwards with the muzzle rise, which technique I will confess did not render me popular on the few occasions I played paintball.

Too many lawyers

Even law professors are beginning to think so:

This week I’m planning to write about various widespread but in my view mistaken beliefs regarding the intensifying crisis in American legal education. I’m going to start with this one: The biggest problem with American legal education is that it fails to produce practice-ready graduates.

This claim has been made by critics of the legal academic establishment for roughly a century now (every 15 years or so some sort of quasi-official report reiterates it). It was a topic of discussion at a law school symposium this weekend on the future of the legal profession, and is apparently a theme of Jim Molitenrno’s forthcoming book, A Profession in Crisis, which argues that the fundamental problems with legal education today are in large part products of the fact that more than a century ago “medical schools decided that their mission would be to turn out doctors, while law schools decided that their mission would be to turn out law professors.”

Now the claim that law schools remain largely indifferent to the fact that law school teaches law students almost nothing about the practice of law is itself quite true. What isn’t the case is that this fact has in itself much to do with the increasingly unacceptable relationship between the cost of a law degree and the economic benefits it confers. Making graduates practice-ready is a fine idea in theory — why else are law students going to law school anyway? — but if such reforms do nothing about, or worse yet exacerbate, the crumbling cost-benefit structure of legal education they will do nothing about this fundamental structural problem. … Any reform that doesn’t make legal education less expensive while reducing the number of new attorneys is doing nothing about the real crisis, which is that law school costs far too much relative to the number of jobs available for attorneys.

Of course, unemployment is not the real problem with producing two lawyers for every one legal job. The primary problem is that lawyers are one of the few professions where they can easily create demand for their services at the expense of everyone else in society. It’s as if doctors were out there breaking legs and releasing flu viruses in order to ensure a growing demand for their services.

The exits close

A lot of people failed to understand the point of my controversial column “Against a Fence”, having been distracted by the deportation discussion. Even fewer understood my reasoning behind it; many critics found it hard to wrap their minds around an anti-immigration, anti-border wall perspective. But it has always been a tautological truth that a wall designed to keep people out is just as useful for keeping people in. The proposed law to strip passports in order to better hold Americans hostage to the IRS would appear to be an indication that the time in which one easily leave the United States is rapidly coming to an end.

The Republican House of Representatives may soon follow the Democratic Senate and give the IRS the power to confiscate your passport on mere suspicion of owing taxes. There’s no place like home, comrade.

‘America, Love It Or Leave It” might be an obsolete slogan if the “bipartisan transportation bill” that just passed the Senate is approved by the House and becomes law. Contained within the suspiciously titled “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act,” or “MAP 21,” is a provision that gives the Internal Revenue Service the power to keep U.S. citizens from leaving the country if it finds that they owe $50,000 or more in unpaid taxes — no court ruling necessary.

It is hard to imagine any law more reminiscent of the Soviet Union that America toppled, or its Eastern Bloc slave satellites.

In a free and well-governed society, exile is a punishment. In an unfree and misgoverned one, exile is impermissible. There is no stronger indication that America is no longer free than the fact that its leadership is seriously contemplating the idea of attempting to imprison its citizens within its borders.

And of course, one tends to doubt that Warren Buffett will lose his passport despite Berkshire Hathaway owing massive back taxes, or that any of the 98,000 federal employees who owe a combined $1 billion in back taxes will be deprived of their ability to travel outside the country. And while the writer is correct to say that “if House Republicans pass this assault on our Constitution, their credibility will be in tatters”, this presumes that the House Republicans still possess any credibility after permitting the continued growth of big government by raising the debt ceiling last year.

For all that the Congressional actions are egregiously unconstitutional and directly opposed to the foundational principles of America, one shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. This behavior is completely typical of financially desperate states that can no longer afford the costs of empire. The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the most recent example; there are many to be found throughout history. “Valentinian III, who remarked in 444 AD that new taxes on landowners and merchants would be catastrophic, still imposed an additional 4% sales tax… and further decreed that all transactions be conducted in the presence of a tax collector.” But however harsh the crackdown, however totalitarian the government, strict tax enforcement never works because its objectives are inevitably based upon a static revenue model that fails to account for Man’s unwillingness to work and to obey the law when the state claims an excessive share on the fruits of his labor.

Enjoy the decline… preferably from a distance.

Criminalizing justice

Guilty for the crime of demanding a day in court:

The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, rejected a bunch of counts against Ravi, including the hate crime charges involving Clementi’s visitor (who testfied during the trial, identified only as M.B.). Because of this selectivity, one juror told the Trenton Star-Ledger, “You feel like justice has been served.” I don’t. Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced on May 21. In addition to a potentially lengthy prison sentence, he faces the likelihood of deportation to India, where he was born. Reprehensible as his conduct was, he does not deserve either of those punishments. Had Clementi not killed himself a few days after what he dismissively called Ravi’s “five sec peep,” leading to the completely unproven conjecture that Ravi’s spying drove him to suicide (a claim the prosecution never made during the trial), Ravi probably would not have faced criminal charges at all, let alone a possible 10-year sentence. Before the trial the prosecutors offered him a deal that involved no jail time and a chance to avoid deportation, which suggests even they do not believe he should be punished as severely as a violent felon. So in addition to all of the questionable crimes for which Ravi is about to be punished, there is one more: insisting on his right to a trial.

Setting aside the absurdity of the “bias intimidation” laws and the idea that the jury was capable of correctly reading, post mortem, the late roommate’s thoughts in the absence of any testimonial or documentary evidence, Jacob Sullum is right to note that the main reason Dharun Ravi is facing jail time is because he refused to be served up as the sacrificial victim demanded by the increasingly gay-influenced mainstream media.

While it makes practical sense to offer criminals far lighter sentencing in order to avoid the time and expense of trying them, it is a complete miscarriage of justice. Such a system rapidly devolves into one where even the completely innocent given massive incentive to plea guilty, not only because they avoid the risk of a disproportionate punishment, but also save themselves the expense of defending themselves.

Autopetard-hoistery

Glenn Greenwald explains why the law demands hanging the anti-speech champions high on their own scaffold:

In June, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law. In that case, the Court upheld the Obama DOJ’s very broad interpretation of the statute that criminalizes the providing of “material support” to groups formally designated by the State Department as Terrorist organizations. The five-judge conservative bloc (along with Justice Stevens) held that pure political speech could be permissibly criminalized as “material support for Terrorism” consistent with the First Amendment if the “advocacy [is] performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization” (emphasis added). In other words, pure political advocacy in support of a designated Terrorist group could be prosecuted as a felony — punishable with 15 years in prison — if the advocacy is coordinated with that group.

This ruling was one of the most severe erosions of free speech rights in decades because, as Justice Breyer (joined by Ginsberg and Sotomayor) pointed out in dissent, “all the activities” at issue, which the DOJ’s interpretation would criminalize, “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” The dissent added that the DOJ’s broad interpretation of the statute “gravely and without adequate justification injure[s] interests of the kind the First Amendment protects.” As Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, who represented the plaintiffs, explained, this was literally “the first time ever” that “the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment permits the criminalization of pure speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity.” Thus, “the court rule[d] that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be made a crime, and that any coordination with a blacklisted group can land a citizen in prison for 15 years.”

In August of last year, The Christian Science Monitor‘s Scott Peterson published a detailed exposé about “a high-powered array of former top American officials” who have received “tens of thousands of dollars” from a designated Terrorist organization – the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — and then met with its leaders, attended its meetings, and/or publicly advocated on its behalf. That group includes Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh — and Fran Townsend.

For some reason, those who favor an expanded role for government never seem to understand that a government with the power to do things you want necessarily has the power to do a lot of things you don’t want. But it’s hardly surprising that Giuliani, Bolton, and Freeh are legally considered terrorists. They have been for a long time.

It should be interesting to see how National Review reacts to this news in light of their inexplicable cheerleading for the nonexistent political career of John Bolton.

Short-sighted secular aggression

Mario Loyola juxtaposes two Obama administration actions:

So the president refuses to apologize for forcing Catholics to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty. But he immediately apologizes because a few of our soldiers inadvertently violated Muslims religious beliefs by trying to dispose of already-desecrated Korans.

Well, despite his apology, hoardes of semi-barbarian Afghans went on a rampage, burned Obama in dog-head effigy, and killed several of our soldiers.

And if you think that’s bad, just imagine what they would do if Obama adopted a rule forcing Muslims to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty.

Of course, even if there is considerable resistance to any such rule, secular enthusiasts will be comfortable knowing they will be able to rely upon the judicial system to protect them from violent protests of the law’s new expanse, right?

Wait a minute….