Forget That: Arrest Him On A Fashion Violation

"The doctor at the centre of the MMR controversy faces being struck off after the General Medical Council today ruled he 'failed in his duties as a responsible consultant', and went against the interests of children in his care.

Dr Andrew Wakefield - who believed he had uncovered a link between the jab and bowel disease and autism - was told he 'acted dishonestly' and had been misleading in the way he described his research, which was published in The Lancet in 1998."

-- Sophie Freeman, bringing more good news our way - this time on the anti-vaccine front: this quack, Wakefield, wrote the B.S. paper that started the whole thing, which lead eventually to us having to listen to Jenny McCarthy act as some kind of medical authority on Oprah (where everybody gets the idea that Oprah's our friend, I don't know,...) - anyway, I'm happy with this latest turn of events, just as I am with England and The Daily Mail.

Giving In To A Listen To My Male Intuition

"I have no way of knowing if Carrey had crank tendencies before he ever met Jenny McCarthy. Guessing from the level of paranoia in his speech, I'd guess there was a pre-existing affinity for conspiracy theories coupled with little or no knowledge of how science works. After all, it's pretty hard to go from completely rational to this level of dumb in a mere year or so."

-- The mighty Orac, commenting on Jim Carrey's participation in the "Green The Vaccines" rally, on his Respectful Insolence blog

Well. If you ever needed proof this blog serves a purpose - besides telling you who your presidential candidates are going to be - I've got one right here, minor as it is.

See, I noticed when Jim Carrey officially became a NewAge cultist, just as it got my attention a few days ago when a lady asked Rush Limbaugh if he was a follower of the Maharishi. (Oh man, did that get my attention: can you imagine Rush following that freak? Or in the lotus position, trying to get in touch with his inner child? The contempt that he spat on Sexy Sadie when he said his name - "You're referring to the philosophy of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,..." was classic.) This is what I said about Obama back in January:

"Obama would be smart to stay cool, quietly abandon the Oprah/Rhonda Byrne New Age, and other crazy spiritual types, and prepare to get real in 4 more years."

So I notice these things. And I can say with authority that, yea, before Jim Carrey met Jenny McCarthy he was pretty weird in the head; already being hung up on the number 23 "for years." (It's funny, because, just yesterday, I was thinking about the stupidity of Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March speech, where he lost everybody by immediately going into numerology. Yep: I got too much of this shit in my own head, kids.)

Listen to Carrey talking to TIME Magazine:

"Blood takes 23 seconds to circulate the body... Jim Carrey plus Virginia Madsen is 23 letters... Jim Carrey plus Joel Schumacher is 23 letters... I was born at 2:30 a.m..."

Nutty. (2:30 a.m = 23? What about the zero?) He even got the number 23 tattooed on his daughter. Isn't that child abuse?

So Mr. Dumb & Dumber has always been crazy - not so crazy to become a Scientologist (methinks he likes his money) - but crazy none-the-less.

But was he always paranoid? That I don't know. Listen to him, below, sure somebody's out to hurt American kids - when it was this same anti-vaccination branch of the NewAge movement that killed kids, in England, by allowing measles to make it's first serious reappearance in 40 years. And don't miss the "NewAge of medicine" reference:



Incredible, huh? Not if you're as used to this stuff as I am. Here, I'm turning to a random page in the book, Gay Astrology: The Complete Relationship Guide For Gay Men, and here's what it says on page,...157:

ARIES/TAURUS

"Mr. Ram and Mr. Bull are two horned - and horny - beasts."

O.K. - I was wrong - I can't go on: that's too much NewAge for me.

Our NewAge Mood For Whatever Wrong Means

"The logo may be--how shall I put this?--either charmingly minimalist or done on the cheap,...but the slogan is potentially quite effective. After all, who wouldn't want "greener" vaccines, whatever that means?,...Certainly I would be in favor of making vaccines as safe as possible. They're incredibly safe now, but there's always room for improvement. What the press and others at whom this crunchy eco-friendly message of reassurance and seeming reason that fits right in with the current mood of the country is aimed don't realize is just one thing.

It's a load of fetid dingo's kidneys."

-- The mighty Orac, getting a taste of the counter-knowledge that's becoming gospel, on his Respectful Insolence blog

I would think it should be obvious that, when Oprah and the former bubble-headed porn star, Jenny McCarthy, start being looked at as authorities on science, people would realize there's something terribly askew going on out there. But I'd be mistaken.

This MMR vaccine nonsense started in Europe - where children actually died from this exact same ignorance. Who knows how far it'll go here? I don't. But (regarding all the various facets of this latest NewAge push into Western society - don't people get that that's what this is?) I'm sure of this much:

We are going to seriously regret it when it's over.

Dead kids: think about it.

You Sheep Not Only Listened But Followed

"The media coverage told,...not only what to think, but also how to think,..."

- Tammy Boyce, researcher in media studies at Cardiff University, commenting on coverage of the MMR/autism anti-vaccine controversy for Spiked!

The column continues:

"She shows how the journalistic commitment to balance, from telling both sides of the story, to presenting a controversy in terms of a contest between two positions of more or less equivalent substance, did not serve the public well,...

This sort of ritualised balance is ‘not always the most effective or honest way of reporting a story’. Thus an objective account,...‘would not have been balanced, because, in reality, the evidence [is not always] balanced’. An objective account would have been obliged to indicate that, on the one hand, there was a vast amount of evidence confirming,...[something] while on the other, there was much speculation, but very little evidence,...giving the misleading impression of an equivalence of evidence, and creating ‘a charade of objectivity’. She also found ‘under-balancing’, where partisan journalists simply reported one side of the story.

There was a similar problem of balancing sources. Journalists and newspapers,...often counterposed,...experts to [believers],...confusing expertise and experience, and elevating emotion over reason in their presentation of the debate."

Pay attention, Believers, because she's singing your song,...