Comic of the day

Among my many anti-science pet peeves is the seemingly increasing ignorant din over getting kids immunized. Or should I say, not getting kids immunized. So the story goes that in order to protect kids, they should not be vaccinated. Why? Because they'll get The Autism. So ironically in communities where this kind of thinking takes hold, vaccination rates drop, herd immunity is weakened, and kids start dying of easily preventable diseases.

The anti-vaccine nonsense stems almost entirely from a fraudulent study from a British doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield. A man named Darryl Cunningham decided to tell the tale of Wakefield in comic form. Here is the first panel of the epic strip. Go check the rest out.

I'll note that the story has a happy ending. Last week Wakefield was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and of acting in a "dishonest", "misleading" and "irresponsible" manner by the General Medical Council of England. He was struck off the GMC register, which is essentially the British medical equivalent of being disbarred.

On the negative side, he's still allowed to spout his nonsense, having retreated to Texas (obviously) to set up his base of operations for what he calls "educating" but is more like "getting kids killed from easily preventable diseases." And he's still making appearances on TV as an "expert", hitting NBC Today on Monday. Yay America.

Late nite Palestinian children's show video dump

I don't want to throw too much of a damper on any puppet/muppet related hopes of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but we have been reminded of previous failed examples. There is the case of Mickey Farfour here, a Palestinian children's show mascot who was struck down by the Israelis.



Luckily Farfour's struggle against the Zionists was taken up by a giant bee.....who died because the Zionists denied him healthcare for whatever bee related illness he had. Luckily his cause was taken up by a giant rabbit, Assud, who....eats Jews or something.



Will the puppet/muppet/man in shoddy suit based violence never end? I can only hope that Karim and Haneen from Shara’a Simsim learn the lessons of Farfour, that bee thing, and the pink bunny. Because Israel doesn't fuck around with uppity Palestinian puppets, even if they are backed by the Children's Television Workshop.

h/t Jesse

Pictures of the day

The best in crazy and sarcastic protest signs from granitepic's photos of New Hampshire health care protests. The cute kids almost make me believe the government is gonna kill grandma.

National Organization for Marriage...Mark II

The National Organization for Marriage is back. This time they aren't going to scare us with ominous storm clouds and doctors who are afraid they won't be able to deny treatment to the gays, this time the threat is to our nation of perpetually confused children. The horror. They will be taught a new way of thinking. Or just be taught to think. I'm not sure which the NOfM thinks is worse.

And really "Anna and Eve"? Please, we all know the pairing that you're supposed to yell out is "Adam and Steve". I'm just glad we can finally start outlawing things that are confusing to children. Like fractions, physics, clouds, the later works of Kierkegaard, the infield fly rule, why mommy and daddy don't love each other any more, how God can let bad things happen to good people, and the underlying mythology of Lost. Confused children is the new terrorism. We must fight it with every fiber of our being.

Good 'ole Nixon logic

You have to admire the stones on some of the Bush Administration people. Take Condi Rice, who had a large role in approving torture. Now that the info has come out, instead of just saying it was wrong and plowing forward with some dissembling bullshit about "mistakes being made" she not only wants to pretend it isn't torture, pretend she didn't help authorize it, but also break out Nixonian logic to defend it.

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's -- And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

So because the President said it wasn't outside the CAT, nothing that happened was outside the CAT. Because of the simple fact the President authorized it means it couldn't have been torture. Anyway it isn't even her fault, so go away. Condi, Condi, Condi, not the best defense. That's the kind of line that made David Frost chortle in disbelief when Nixon said it in all those Frost/Nixon trailers. Bush can't magically declare something legal, not even if he wiggles his nose, waves a wand over the authorization, or recites some phrase he half remembered from a Harry Potter book.

I'm surprised all it took was a couple of students from Stanford to break you down into a quivering ball of incoherent justifications. If a couple of buzzed freshmen can do it, how easy is it going to be for the Spanish courts?

Broken News: Bush announces comprehensive legacy project

WASHINGTON—What is left of the Bush Administration today unveiled a multi-faceted long-term plan for shaping not only how people remembered his Presidency but to also rehabilitate the parts of his legacy that citizens have not permanently blocked from their collective memory. The plan, dubbed Project: That Same Thing We Did With Reagan, will be slowly rolled out over the next few months. While some insiders note that there will be little to no change in how people view the 43rd President and his Administration in the short term, the overarching goal of this project is to reshape public and historical opinion twenty to thirty years down the line.

“We are aware of how things must look to people now,” observed project leader David Bollard. “But they aren’t taking the long-term view. As Condi, the President and really anyone who has tried to mitigate the damage to their careers and personal lives while speaking on behalf of the Administration for the past year has said, we all feel that everything we have done will be vindicated by history. But we aren’t just going to sit back and let the liberal historical elite make those judgments; we’ve got to start working now to ensure that the urine content of Mr. Bush’s future gravesite will be kept to an absolute minimum.”

Project leaders have noted that while a formal declaration of the legacy initiative was only announced today, the administration’s work had already stretched back years. They point to the failure to fund No Child Left Behind and decreasing world education rankings as a sign that future children might not even be able to read, let alone comprehend a snooty tome about the Iraq war by some pampered cyborg David McCullough.

Additionally, nearly a decade of mandatory dishonesty in every facet of governance and media relations has, they assume, dealt critical damage to the concepts of context, meaning, word definitions, time, space, reality, and the nature of communication.

“A few more years and we might have been able to rewrite the meaning of language,” sighed a despondent Karl Rove. “But I think we’ve severely damaged the underlying structure. I’d like to see some future pundit try and argue that Katrina was a fiasco when one of our legacy drones simultaneously argues that New Orleans was a myth and that the Washington Monument is really a statue built to commemorate the bold and decisive action Bush took during the crisis. Let’s see the future masses try and get a handle on what was happening during this period when they’re bombarded by that kind of shit.”

While the project is meant to rehabilitate George Bush and his administration, some key figures will not have their reputations mended by the project. For example, Donald Rumsfeld will be edited out of all official White House documents, while his image in all photographs will be replaced by photoshopped plants. Official records and accounts of Colin Powell will slowly be morphed into the records and accounts of Barack Obama, thereby melding the two into one under the guise that “they all look alike” and casting the election of the first black President as a triumphant endorsement of the Bush Administration.

As for Vice-President Dick Cheney, his actions will remain unchanged and unedited. In fact a pictographic history of his deeds will be carved onto a seven story jade obelisk and placed at the center of Washington DC as a warning to all. Rumors and legends will be spread and children will fear his name and violent retribution. Cheney himself will be allowed to return to his fortress to sleep for a thousand years, hibernating in the foul earth, awaiting the call of the Elder Gods so he can awake and bathe the planet is his horror once again.

But project leaders have placed the most hope for legacy redemption into a series of two foot by four foot lead tablets. On these series of tablets will be inscribed an alternate history of the past eight years, one filled with triumphs, successes, peace, competent decision making, and free puppies with free candy in their mouths and free balloons attached to their free collars. These tablets will be buried at over two hundred different sites worldwide.

The hope? “Look, we may be craven liars but we’re well aware of the state of the country right now,” observed Mr. Bollard. “Our projections have the survival of this country and consequently the world pegged at about 50%. So in the likely event that society is negated and the human race dies out because… say… the President traded some smallpox to Syria for an autographed Nolan Ryan baseball, then we have a contingency. When aliens survey the ruins of our once great civilization they will come across the tablets and, provided they take the time to figure out our language, learn of the ‘legacy’ of George W. Bush. Try countering that, Huffington Post!”

Project leaders hope to have the first phase completed before the complete collapse of centralized global leadership and the dissolution of the United States. If America exists in June they hope to further the rollout with pundit spots on Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Sex pledges defiled by teenage dangly parts

Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data

Teenagers who pledged to avoid sex until marriage were as likely to have intercourse as other U.S. adolescents, according to a survey of conduct mostly in 1990s.

Teens who took the pledge also were less likely to use birth control pills or condoms than those making no promise, according to the research in the January issue of Pediatrics. The results show that teens need information on safe sex and pregnancy prevention even if they vow to refrain, a study author said.

The pledges, made orally or in writing, are viewed by advocates as buttressing federally funded education programs that say avoiding pre-marital sex rather than using protection will curb pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. President George W. Bush’s administration more than doubled the budget for abstinence-only education programs since 1999 to $204 million this fiscal year. More than a dozen states have rejected federal money rather than limit what is taught.

Not only do kids who take those abstinence pledges fornicate at the same rate as those who don't, they do so in a much more dangerous way. Essentially funding for abstinence only programs and abstinence pledges is an almost direct funding of a shadow pro-teen pregnancy, pro-STD, pro-unprotected sex program. Oh those precious unintended consequences.

Furthermore the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that abstinence programs don't affect teen behavior and a Congressionally mandated study found the same. Clearly I think we know what to do here: put our heads down, ignore every study that keeps telling us the same thing, and keep pretending this is a worthwhile use of money. You know, the same type of behavior that helps us win the War on Drugs.

Children's letters to God

Website Mango Fun was kind enough to bring us unincinerated letters from children to their God. Unknown if God ever answered back or smote these pre-pubescent miscreants for questioning his work, or if he was too drunk to notice (like usual). And yes Bobby, God is an American. Jesus and Gandhi too.