Re: Womanspace

Oh Nature, just admit you made a mistake publishing that worthless piece of fiction and move on with being a GlamourMag.

In other news, scientists discover ImmigrantSpace, a parallel dimension accessible only by immigrants trying to learn English and escape from violent gangs in the post-apocalyptic landscape of America's big city public schools.

HPV vaccine

At the recent debate of hopefuls for the Republican presidential nomination, Michelle Bachman apparently made a series of ugly false claims about the safety record of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine.  It was the usual dribble of fear-spasms calculated to appeal to a rabid anti-feminist sub-group of the electorate.

It was ugly because HPV kills: along with the initial, rather unpleasant* disease, HPV causes cervical, vulvar, vaginal, penile, anal, and oropharyngeal cancer.  In fact it causes most cervical cancers which mean that the HPV vaccine might be the first pharmaceutical which lets us cure a cancer.    HPV vaccine also has a shiny safety record, better than the safety record of Tylenol/aspirin/ibuprofen which I'm sure Bachman regularly throws down her gullet.  So, here's the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to set the record straight:

 “The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made in the Republican presidential campaign that HPV vaccine is dangerous and can cause mental retardation. There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement. Since the vaccine has been introduced, more than 35 million doses have
been administered, and it has an excellent safety record."

Furthermore, this is only an effective way to cure cancer population-wide if it happens in the right time-frame, i.e.-before sexual activity.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that girls receive HPV vaccine around age 11 or 12. That’s because this is the age at which the vaccine produces the best immune response in the body, and because it’s
important to protect girls well before the onset of sexual activity. In the U.S., about 6 million people, including teens, become infected with HPV each year, and 4,000 women die from cervical cancer. This is a life-saving vaccine that can protect girls from cervical cancer.”

Dear parents: do it.  Dear everybody else: if you're considering voting for this woman, or any other Republican candidate, please convince them to engage in political grandstanding less likely to cause the death of women and the destruction of families.
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* Sorry if you clicked that.

It warms my heart

It really warms my heart when things go right in the world.  Twenty-eight years and $1 million is about right for a judge preying on vulnerable children.  This part gets me:

The sentence was four times the 87 months sentence that Ciavarella and federal prosecutors had agreed to when he pleaded guilty to charges in 2009.

The prosecutors had a good case against this guy and they wanted to agree to _what_!?!?!? Many thanks to the judge who threw out that plea-deal.

Chainsaw on a rope swing

John Cook quotes Merlin Mann:

If a project doesn’t have an owner, it’s like a chainsaw on a rope swing. Why would anyone even go near that?

By itself, that is a fantastic visual.  Personally, I try to run as fast as possible. Then he comments further:

Perhaps worse than a project with no owner is a project with a powerful owner who doesn’t care about the project. The project is important in the sense that the worker bees will be held responsible for seeing it happen, but not so important that it’s worth the owner’s time to help. “This is important for you to develop, but not important enough for me to take the time to tell you in any detail what it should be.”

Sure this is a problem in industry, but it's practically the definition of academia.

Twist it a little more, Cohen!

Andrew Cohen writes this about John Yoo:

Former government lawyer John Yoo taking credit on behalf of the Bush administration for Sunday's strike against Osama bin Laden is like Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, taking credit for the results of the 1998 Academy Awards.

John Yoo is of course trying to do just that.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Vol II

Apparently yesterday was for show, he does intend to depopulate Benghazi.  I've never been happier to see Sarkozy's face on the front page of the newspaper.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

The man talks big, but demonstrates a certain lack of intestinal fortitude.  Sure he'll bomb people and threaten house-to-house massacres on his opponents.  He would carry out the massacres, there's no doubt about that.  Now he gets told "no" by the UN, and this is what we get:

Apparently pulling back from the increasingly bellicose statements as recently as Thursday from Colonel Qaddafi and his son Seif al-Islam, Mr. Koussa — his hands shaking as he read a prepared statement at a press conference Friday afternoon — said that the Qaddafi government would comply with the United Nations resolution by halting combat operations.

Obviously he's hoping to negotiate some sort of split-state solution or amnesty for himself and his family.  Let's just put some of his previous "belicose" statements up for contrast:

“We will come house by house, room by room. It’s over. The issue has been decided,” Colonel Qaddafi said Thursday on a radio call-in show before the United Nations vote. To those who continued to resist, he vowed: “We will find you in your closets. We will have no mercy and no pity.”

There's no doubt that the road to some semblance of normal governance in Libya is long, but we should all take pleasure at this setback in the Qaddafi family quest to reduce Libya to their private estate.  It's a giant Qadaffi FAIL and it warms my heart.

Judge Fail

"Kids for Cash" is an apt description of the (hopefully) last episode in the unfortunate legal careers of Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr.. Those two judges have the distinction of taking $2.6 million from Pensylvnnia Child Care---a juvenile detention facility---in exchange for sending kids to them without the benefit of appropriate hearings. Not just without the benefit of hearings, but with the benefit of "pretend" hearings conducted by Ciavarella where the juvenile offenders were denied counsel.

In U.S. law judges are partially protected from liability for decisions made on the bench, so the two perps in this case may only get part of the punishment they deserve for their actions. The best outcome, beyond what litigation brings, may be for the names Conohan and Ciavarella to become synonymous with the failure of judicial ethics.

Background:

- Juvenile Law Center page
- law.com 1, law.com 2