In Canada, as in Europe, politicians look to unelected community leaders, often deeply conservative figures, to speak for their particular communities.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Never ever set foot in Saudi Arabia
An Australian man who went for the hajj has been sentenced to 500 lashes and a year in jail. Saudi officials accused him of insulting the companions of the prophet Muhammad.
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Details details
Following up some links from the coverage of the Burzynski matter. From David Colquhoun, an item from the National Council Against Health Fraud newsletter March/April 1997:
The trial of Stanislaw Burzynski for cancer fraud ended in a hung jury (6-6)
on March 4. CBS’s 48 Hours‘ interviews of jurors told the tale as to why
they couldn’t agree. Clearly, the jurors agreed that Burzynski was guilty as
charged of violating court orders not to distribute his unapproved
“Antineoplastons” in interstate commerce, but the fact that some desperate
cancer patients believed Burzynski’s remedy was keeping them alive (or, at
least, was keeping their hope for recovery alive) made the case too emotional a matter for them to convict him of his crimes. One juror who was interviewed admitted that she had disregarded the judge’s instructions to ignore such issues.The CBS reporter confronted Burzynski with the calculation that, based upon his fee system and patient load, his annual income would be $20 million. Burzynski concurred but said that not all of his patients paid their bills. Burzynski claims that his medicine is quite costly to produce. Cancer
researcher and NCAHF board member, Saul Green, PhD, pointed to prices in a catalog showing that a bottle of medicine cost Burzynski 80 cents.The Burzynski trial was stereotypical. Supporters paraded with placards
extolling the doctor and his cure, while the media reporter focused on a few
individuals who apparently do have cancer but whose survival is no more than one would expect from any group of patients. The prosecution is shown as dealing with technical points of law, while the doctor and his patients are “real people.”It is classical deception by illusion. Viewers have no way of knowing if the
demonstrators are really cancer patients. A study of a laetrile rally in 1978
found having cancer did not predict participation in an anti-FDA rally; rather being against fluoridation, disliking MDs, liking chiropractors, and shopping in health food stores were the determinants. Viewers have no way of evaluating the real medical conditions of the patients shown. Most are not even aware of just how normal a cancer patient can look and feel even in advanced stages of the disease. And, no one knows the proportion of failures among the large number of patients who Burzynski has treated over the two decades he has promoted his remedy.Trial by placard waving emotion is a form of mob rule. More and more it
seems like society is letting emotion overrule the sound judgment of carefully considered law.And also via DC, Dorothy Bishop on “The weird world of US ethics regulation” –
I had assumed that this trial hadn’t undergone ethical scrutiny, because I could not see how any committee could agree that it was ethical to charge someone enormous sums of money to take part in a research
project in which there was no guarantee of benefit. I suspect that many people would pay up if they felt they’d exhausted all other options. But this doesn’t mean it’s right.I was surprised, then, to discover that the Burzynski trial had undergone review by an Institutional Review Board (IRB – the US term for an ethics committee). A letter describing the FDA’s review of the relevant IRB is available on the web. It concludes that “the IRB did not adhere to the applicable statutory requirements and FDA regulations governing the protection of human subjects.” There’s a detailed exposition of the failings of the Burzynski Institute IRB, but no mention of fees charged to patients. So I followed a few more links and came to a US government site that described regulatory guidelines for ethics committees, which had a specific section on Charging for Investigational Products. It seems the practice of passing on research costs to research participants is allowed in the US system.Well don’t I feel proud of the US system.
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Pour rire
Line of the day – from Popehat, Junk Science And Marketeers and Legal Threats, Oh My! –
As a public relations move, firing Marc Stephens and hiring the Dozier Law Group is roughly like firing Jeffrey Dahmer as your sous-chef and hiring Hannibal Lecter to take his place.
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The small tent is good enough
Jacques Berlinerblau has some advice for US atheists.
The real priority for American Atheism concerns its political future, its ability to shape policy agendas so as to represent the interests of its constituency.
Does it? I don’t think it does – not (as implied) to the exclusion of other things. I don’t really think of atheism as having a “constituency,” or as expecting to be able to shape policy agendas so as to represent the interests of its constituency. That sounds like political operative talk, and while I do think atheism is political as well as philosophical (in the broad sense of the word), I don’t think it’s political in that way. It’s too specialized for that. Secularism can be political in that way, but not atheism.
The key question, then, is: What do atheists want? If what they want is to abolish religion—a New Atheist theme with deep roots in the Radical Enlightenment, Deism, and Marxism—then there is no political future. Atheism will simply remain a movement of overheated malcontents lamenting their great civic misfortune.
I think he has that wrong, and I said so in a comment there. We don’t want to abolish religion; we want to push it back, and to put it on the intellectual defensive, where it belongs.
“The Constitution,” vice-presidential candidate Joseph Liebermann famously intoned in 2000, “guarantees freedom of religion not freedom from religion.” It is precisely this form of demagoguery and its associated policy implications that atheists must strenuously challenge.
Freedom of and freedom from religion are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed. For once I completely agree with Berlinerblau. I despise that intonation of Lieberman’s; it makes me livid. (Berlinerblau gave Lieberman an extra n at the end of his name, and deprived Joe Hoffmann of his. Oh those pesky extra Ens!)
But after that Berlinerblau goes off the rails, because he’s too intent on being political in the sense mentioned above – the James Carville sense, the “framing” sense.
Widen the Tent: Why must the admission price to American Atheism be total nonbelief in God and hatred of all religion? Can’t the movement, at the very least, split the difference?
Why can’t those who have doubts about God but remain affiliated in some way with a religion be included in the big tent? Conversely, why can’t those who have no religion (see below) but some type of spiritual or faith commitment enter the movement as well? Why can’t skeptics and agnostics join the club? What about heretics and apostates? In short, democratic mobilization requires numbers. Atheism needs numbers, accurate numbers. . .
Why? Well because that’s what atheism means. Secularism can be (and is) that kind of big tent, but atheism does mean nonbelief in god (though certainly not hatred of all religion).
Reach Out and Touch (Moderate) Faith: And while we are at it, why can’t atheists make common cause with religious moderates? In its first decade of operations New Atheism has virtually assured its political irrelevance by acerbically shunning the very religious folks (think Mainline Protestants, Liberal Catholics, Reform Jews, etc.) who are waging their own pitched battles with fundamentalists. “Even mild and moderate religion,” averred Richard Dawkins in the The God Delusion, “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.”
Well, some atheists can do that, but some of us simply don’t want to. That’s because “political relevance” is not our only or main goal. Some of us just really do want to be free of all religion, even the mild and moderate kind, and we want to be free to say so, and to say why. We can of course make common cause with religious moderates on all sorts of issues, and we do, but we can’t very well make it on the issue of atheism itself.
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Another turn of the screw
The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, according to an article in Wired.
They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.
“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”
Absolutely nothing surprising there. Bad things keep happening, so you develop a strong tendency to react quickly…and you’re stuck with it. A lifetime of feeling extra, exaggerated fear and dread. What a gift.
It’s not at all surprising but it’s deeply sad.
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Jacques Berlinerblau on the future of atheism in America
“Why must the admission price to American Atheism be total nonbelief in God?”
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Kosher cell phones
The first step was a kosher-certified cell phone, approved by the rabbinical committee for telecommunications.
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How abuse changes a child’s brain
The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat: primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain.
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David Allen Green on Niall Ferguson’s libel threat
Taylor and Trevor-Roper dealt with controversy by simply getting stuck into the next round of acrimony and recrimination. Much better than a libel suit.
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Sohrab Ahmari on democracy and demagoguery
Beneath the ultramodern veneer of skyscrapers dotting Abu Dhabi’s desert landscape lies an illiberal society that severely curtails citizens’ fundamental rights.
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UN Women is in trouble
Little money, turf wars, and tepid support bordering on neglect.
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Pakistani family on trial for honor killing in Belgium
Sadia Sheikh left the family home to study after her parents tried to arrange a marriage with a cousin she had never met. She was shot dead on October 22, 2007.
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Unreasoning awe
One from the “how did I miss this?” file – Tony Blair is gobsmacked that it was government policy not to appoint a Catholic as ambassador to the Vatican.
The former prime minister tells a BBC Northern Ireland documentary – to be broadcast from Wednesday 17 February – that the policy of banning Catholics from the post was “stupid”, “ridiculous” and “discriminatory”.
Really? Is it discriminatory not to appoint a lobbyist for cigarette manufacturers to a health-related job? Is it discriminatory not to appoint a murderer to run a domestic violence shelter?
Has Tony Blair never heard of the concept “conflict of interest”? The question answers itself; of course he has. Yet the idea that Catholicism might be an interest in that sense appears to leave him dazed with wonder.
In 1917 the Foreign Office issued a memorandum saying that Britain’s representative at the Vatican “should not be filled with unreasoning awe of the Pope,” and the post had been filled by a non-Catholic until Mr Campbell’s appointment.
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[T]he ambassadorship to the Holy See became vacant and I said ‘Francis would be a great person to do that’ and they said ‘Well you know this, prime minister, but actually we don’t really have this open to Catholics’ and I honestly thought I misunderstood what they were saying.
“I said ‘How do you mean? We’re talking about that Embassy, the Vatican one’. They said ‘Yes, I know, but not a Catholic there.’
“I said ‘It’s the Vatican, the Pope, he’s a Catholic. You mean we actually as a matter of policy… say you can’t have a Catholic?’ I said ‘What is this? It’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard’.”
Well if he was really that baffled and stunned, he was being remarkably thick. “The Vatican” is a Catholic thing, just as the mafia is Their Thing. “The Vatican” isn’t a country, it’s the headquarters of the Catholic church. Yes, sending a Catholic ambassador to the headquarters of the Catholic church would be a stupid thing to do, because the ambassador would risk being too deferential to the Vatican. It’s extraordinary for Tony Blair to claim not to be able to take that in.
Mr Blair added: “Can you imagine we say for years and years and years the one category of person we shouldn’t have as ambassador to the Holy See is someone who shares their faith?
“I don’t think that is very sensible – not in this day.
“Quite apart from being discriminatory, how stupid is it? So Francis was the first.”
Yes, we can imagine it, because that is the one category of person you shouldn’t have as ambassador to “the Holy See” – and that’s why: it’s because it’s a theological entity, therefore an ambassador of the same religion would not be disinterested, to put it mildly.
Blair always does this absurd pretend game that religion has no actual content and that it therefore can’t possibly be a reason for caution or criticism or rejection. He pretends that his own Catholicism is just a matter of going to church with his family, as if it had no more substantive meaning than seats on an airplane. He shouldn’t do that.
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Austerity for the Vatican?
Of course not. Marc Alan Di Martino looks at the accounts.
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A perfect storm of press releases
Some more on the Burzynski clinic and the Observer.
From Keir Liddle at the Twenty-first Floor on a perfect storm for skepticism.
The characterisation of skeptical bloggers as aggressive and sanctimonious is unfortunately nothing new and there are undoubtedly skeptics out there who benefit from reading Hayley Stevens post on the subject but I for one am fed up of how we are characterised. We are seen at best as spoilsports and at worst know it alls robbing the universe of beauty and people of hope. We seem to seen as the lackeys of either big pharma or representatives of some sort of scientific hegemony intent on unweaving the rainbow. But most skeptics aren’t like that in the slightest, we don’t live in a grey universe composed solely of reason and logic, we find wonder and beauty in the near infinite majesty of the Universe and the more we discover the more there is to be awestruck by.
Though on the subject of robbing people of hope? Well yes perhaps we can stand accused of that.
But it is false hope we are dashing. False hope that we ultimately believe to be harmful and damaging to those gambling on unproven or “pioneering” treatments. False hope that still leaves families bereaved but also bankrupt. False hope that robs families of precious time with their loved ones. False hope that drives people to chase miracle cure after miracle cure and die not with dignity but worrying that they haven’t done enough.
From Unity at Ministry of Truth, with a really thorough excavation of what the Burzynski clinic has been doing, including close inspection of a series of press releases.
In short, there is nothing whatsoever in the public domain to indicate that the phase III brainstem glioma trial has progressed any further than the two partnership agreements made in 2009 and, therefore, no way of knowing which trial Billie Bainbridge will be enrolled into, if her family can raise the estimated £200,000 needed to secure treatment at the Burzynski clinic. Whether or not this accords with the Bainbridge family’s own understanding of the ‘experimental’ nature of the treatment offered by the Burzynski Clinic is anyone’s guess but, looking at this from the outside, it seems to me to be a most unsatisfactory state of affairs, particular if – as seems entirely possible – would be patients are being attacted to clinic by its press release and the implicit promise of a slot in a well regulated phase III trial.
Read the whole thing.
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Opposition to gay marriage is a unity device
Scotland for Marriage means marriage as a privilege from which some groups are barred – just as Focus on the Family means some families aren’t included.
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Flying around the internet
Skeptical Humanities on the Observer on Burzynski:
Entire communities throw untold sums of money at the slimmest (nonexistent, really) hope that these patients will recover at the Burzynski Clinic, and the Observer finds this uplifting.
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Uncritically giving a cancer quack uncritical press? How could we possibly have mistaken that for promotion? We should have just called it as it was: a shoddy, pathetic, and irresponsible attempt at journalism.
The Internet apologizes for not making this clearer.
Now do you f*cking job and protect Billie, her family, and your readers from this immense fraud.
RJB
Please consider donating to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. They turn nobody away, even if they can’t pay. Unlike Burzynski.
Quackometer on the Observer on Burzynski:
Written by Stephen Pritchard, the Readers’ Editor, the response attempts to justify its coverage and blames bloggers for “aggression, sanctimony and a disregard for the facts”. It is a disgraceful and self-serving response. Pritchard claimed their story was one of “courage and generosity”. No it was not. It was a story of exploitation of courage and generosity. The Observer still fails to understand this.
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The response fails to address the serious concerns raised about the article, and instead appears to attack those concerned for insensitivity and a lack of understanding. This is incredible. I have found almost without exception, the dozens of blog posts written about this story to be compassionate, insightful and targeted at those who should have known better – not the families of cancer sufferers – but those promoting the clinic, raising money for untested treatments, and the clinic itself.
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Pritchard justifies the approach by saying “the point that is being lost in the vitriol that is flying around the internet” is that the treatment provides some hope for the parents.” My original article suggested that it was cruel to raise false hope. The costs involved are not just financial, but carry pain and risks for those being treated. In any medical treatment decision, there are benefits and risks.
The “treatment” also provides a large lump of money for the clinic. Giving it to a church might also provide some hope for the parents, but would the Observer write a human-interest story about a campaign to raise £200,000 to pay the Catholic church to pray for a child with a brain tumor?
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The Observer still doesn’t understand Burzynski
Entire communities throw untold sums of money at the slimmest hope that these patients will recover at the Burzynski Clinic, and the Observer finds this uplifting.
