You Paid HOW Much?

£37,071 is the going rate for a missing child website these days, according to accounts published in the Daily Mail.

The Mail isn't a paper you can usually rely on for unbiased facts, but since this amount has been carefully extracted from the Find Madeline fund's published accounts we can probably take it at face value.

£37,000 for a goddamn poster site! What are these people coding on, Crays? No wait, they're PAYING the Krays - because that's fucking daylight robbery.

It also pissed away spent a staggering £111,522 on legal expenses not connected with the McCann's defence; £36,000 on professional fees;
over £13,000 distributing merchandise and nearly £27,000 producing it; it goes on.

The largest single expense was the £250,000 wasted on the portugese detective agency which claimed it would find the missing child (yeah, let's not forget this is about a missing child) in three months.

£250,000 spent - result: fuck all! I hope these arseholes are proud of themselves - if I buy a toaster and it doesn't work, the shop gives me my money back, but it seems if I make an outrageous claim that I can do what the police have failed to - I get to keep the money when I fail to produce a result.

What a farce. This is why, like all good parents, I keep my children close to me or have a responsible person in charge of them when I cannot.

Madeline and her siblings deserve non of this, her parents however brought it on themselves.

Peter Hitchens' Schoolboy Logic

A couple of days ago Peter Hitchens ranted about wind farms. No, not about the silly events at Conisholme, but about the fact that when (as Hitchens put it) they are needed most during a cold snap, they stand dormant.

In his opening salvo, he demonstrates his skill with words in equal measure with his confounded ignorance:

"The swivel-eyed, intolerant cult, which endlessly shrieks – without proof – that global warming is man-made, has produced many sad effects. The collapse of proper education has made two whole generations vulnerable to rubbishy fads."

Let's not forget that this is a man who believes Darwin was wrong about evolution: so if anyone needs to do some soul-searching about education he needs to look in a mirror. There is any amount of proof that global warming is a man-made - but to understand it you have to open your mind to the frightening possibility that we're fucking with our environment.

Hitchens ignorant and intolerant naval gazing makes him popular with his followers, who take his word for it because that's what they want to hear, but leaves scientists in a frenzy of despair. Hitchen's needs to keep his job and the best way to do that is to raise a cheer from middle England's dullards .

Hitchens goes on:

"But the disfiguring of the country with useless windmills, and the insane plan to ban proper light bulbs, are supreme triumphs of this dimwit pseudo-religion.

"Both schemes override facts and logic. During the current cold spell, observant persons will have noticed that there has been very little wind, a rather common combination. Thus, at a time of great need for power, wind turbines would be almost entirely useless for producing electricity."

But as is usual with Hitchen's schoolboy approach, he's completely missed (or deliberately ignored) the very point, which is this: if wind farms generate electricity when the wind is blowing then conventional - precious - resources such as coal, oil and gas are preserved for the times when it isn't.

I can't say I'm terribly fond of wind farms and hope that new developments will improve and even remove the need for them. But we have to put the future first - because we only own the here and now; the future belongs to our children.

Daily Mail Readers Are Gullible

This is just a quick update on a story I ran a couple of days ago here.

One Daily Mail reader had the gall, the audacity to point out that the other commentators were well, daft, by writing:

"Are the public so gullible to believe such rubbish[?] One blade has broken off and the other was damaged in the freak weather conditions."

Which is pretty close to my own diagnosis and that of many experts including an insurance specialist who sees several of these incidents every year.

Mail readers are outraged - so far the comment is rating -90 (Sunday 21:00) and sinking! Dear god - are they really that stupid? Apparently, they are:

Molly of Stockport (currently one of the most popular comments at +86) has this to say:

"It isn't mentioned in this account but others state that there was no trace of the missing blade ... could ball lightening do that?"

It isn't mentioned, dear because it ISN'T MISSING and never was - it's been sent back to the manufacturer to see what went wrong; and what's ball lightning got to do with it?

It goes on to quote, rent-a-fool, Nick Pope a former MOD employee who now specialises in UFOlogy for TV. Mr Pope told the Mail:

'This is a really bizarre case. What's particularly exciting is that because there's been a collision, there will be residue of the object involved. Forensic science will enable this material to be recovered and analysed. This elevates this UFO case, because with most sightings all you have is eyewitness testimony or indistinct and shaky film footage taken on a mobile phone.'

Does it indeed? All it elevates is the smell of bullshit coming from your direction.

The flashing lights were still most likely of terrestrial origin - fireworks; and the noise - well can you imagine the din if a rotor blade comes off and hits a neighbouring one at speed? There's going to be one hell of a bang!

The residue - what are you going to say when this turns out to be parts of a neighbouring blade, Nick? Will the German engineers even bother to look?

Much of the rest of this is empty speculation fuelled by Nick Pope and his band of gullible idiots. Not that it matters. Nick never has to answer his critics: he just does a Hitchens and ignores them.

World's Fastest Cordless Drill - 0-60 in 1 second.

OK, I lied, it's a motorcycle, but it is powered by the same battery technology that drives DeWalt cordless drills.




So, apart from being an amazing feat of engineering, what's so special about this? Well, The Daily Mail reports in typical disregard for science that:

"The bike's makers claim that the G-force which the rider has to contend with is three times more than that faced by a skydiver during freefall."

G-force is a unit equal to the force exerted by gravity. It gives weight to a mass. The other way to look at it, is we are all being accelerated towards the earth by 1G (although strictly, that depends on where on Earth you are). 1G is about 9.8m per second (every second).

A skydiver in free-fall reaches a terminal velocity at about 120mph (200kph) due to wind resistance and never experiences any more g-force than if he were sat in a chair. The equations of motion for an object under constant acceleration, accelerating from a standing start are as follows:


The bike covers the quarter mile track (about 402 meters) in 7.8 seconds giving an acceleration of 13.2 ms-2 which is well below the brain-busting 29ms-2 acceleration claimed attributed to KillaCycle. There is something I'm ignoring here and I'll come back to that before you jump in and comment on it, but if KillaCycle really was achieving such acceleration it would travel nearly 1800 metres (over a mile) in the time.

So where does that come from? Clearly, KillaCycle is not accelerating constantly for the entire quarter mile. The 3G experience comes in the first shoulder socket-wrenching second and it's likely that most of that happens in a small fraction of a that second.

Cars, planes, motorcycles and pretty much everything that accelerates under power do so variably - the acceleration curve: but the Mail isn't interested in that and just runs the quote from the release.

Perhaps more interesting though is the boast that a four minute charge from wind energy is enough to power the vehicle (they claim) for seven runs. The energy may indeed by "green" but you can bet your CO2 emissions that those batteries are about as recyclable as George W Bush is climate aware

However, let's take nothing from the achievement, even if it is a bit of a white elephant. KillaCycle's team are now said to be working on a 1000BHP version. Presumably the Mail will be telling us next that it's twice as fast too.

In other news, someone stole my shaving cream so my face is sore.

Daily Mail Contradicts Itself

Peter Hitches is a journalist with strong views and he doubts evolution:

"For in my view the theory of evolution is done no favours by its fervent supporters. Interestingly, it's not comparable to other major scientific theories (like the theories of flight, gravity and relativity) to which its supporters always link it. These can be used to predict events, and are testable. Evolution is a theory about the distant past, unobserved and now unobservable."

In this single paragraph, Hitchens both makes an interesting point and then reveals amazing ignorance of both evolution and the scientific method.

First to his positive observation that people like Richard Dawkins (and hell, even folks like me) constantly bang on at people like him to leave it alone and let us study it.

He's right, we do: but with bloody good reason.

Evolution represents probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made but like many other major discoveries it threw a massive scientific clog into machinery of the great Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The modern-day theory of evolution, so called neo-Darwinian theory is what most scientists regard as the definitive (if incomplete) version; and it's this incomplete bit that pro-theists like to drive wedges into.

Anti-evolutionists, creationists - call them what you will don't want replace evolution with a better natural theory, they want to replace it with a story written four thousand years back by a bunch of nomadic Jews.

Which is why we get so utterly pissed off.

This alternative to evolution is no more an alternative than a slice of plastic is alternative to a sandwich. An alternative to a sandwich would be, say a nice, juicy Aberdeen Angus burger topped with melted cheese and a dill pickle... oh wait, it must be nearly lunchtime here.

It takes Hitchens just a dozen words to prove how strikingly ignorant he is about the whole affair:

"Evolution is a theory about the distant past, unobserved and now unobservable."

WRONG!

One theory about the distant past that a majority of scientists agree with is the Big Bang. We can observe the remnants of Big Bang in the cosmic background radiation - the very low temperature afterglow (about 4 degrees kelvin) of the cataclysmic event that brought our universe into being, yet we cannot - directly - see the event itself. Only a very few scientists actually disagree with Big Bang although small details are frequently debated. We don't have all the answers, yet Hitchens and his ilk don't, err, bang on about it.

Big Bang does not contradict a theist world view - whereas evolution does (sort of). There's a small matter, ignored by creationists that does allow room for God, if you must, called abiogenesis: the creation of life itself - we still don't know for sure how life came about. The famous Miller-Ulrey experiment looked promising, but failed to produce concrete results.

Evolutionary theory does not concern itself with abiogenesis - it only cares about how organisms developed from the simplest form of life into what we are today.

Hitchens can't grasp this.

Evolution is not a theory of some distant past: it's a theory of the development of all life. It is directly observable and it does make testable predictions. Darwin's contemporary, Karl Popper, solidified how theories work by making them falsifiable.

I have a theory that all sheep are white because all the sheep I have ever observed are white. This theory would be valid unless someone could find a black sheep. Even if I could produce a billion white sheep, a single black one would destroy my theory.

If, for example, a dog gave birth to a litter of cats (without human intervention) then evolution theory would be destroyed in an instant. It doesn't happen. Evolution is pretty safe as a theory among respectable scientists.

Journalists like Peter Hitchens are still wrong yet the Mail allows them to vent their spleens at regular intervals about stuff they know less than nothing about. In an amazing change of pace, the paper prints this Salute to Charles Darwin by the respected scientist, Desmond Morris, which is a remarkable about face .

They've also run the story I covered here several days late, but refreshing to see nevertheless with all the evidence including some I didn't include.

My guess is there's someone standing in over the Christmas holidays and the normally dumb service will be resumed shortly.

Dail Mail is Confused by Snow

Must be a slow day at The Mail as a Canadian woman makes headlines after surviving for three days in snow. In what it calls a Christmas 'Miracle', the second one today, the Mail extols:

"Donna Molnar, who disappeared during a heavy blizzard, was discovered under two feet of snow wearing only ordinary clothing. Rescuers were stunned to find the 55-year-old Canadian still breathing after enduring temperatures as low as -15C."

It's great that she was found alive, maybe a little surprising but not really a miracle and not at all unheard of.

Mrs Molar, who is reported to be suffering from depression had lost family members over the festive period. When she went missing in the middle of snowstorm, friends feared the worst. Her abandoned car was discovered over the weekend - it's not clear at this stage how long she was out in the open or when she was buried by a snowdrift.

The Mail continues:

"...almost three full days after Molnar went missing, volunteer Ray Lau’s dog, Ace, became excited by a scent he had picked up in a field. Under heavy snow and high winds, the animal would normally be unlikely to smell a human presence."

So the Mail is almost implying that Mrs Molnar has been under the snow for three days - we already know that for at least some of that time she had been in her van. We can take it as read that she was in dire straits, but what of the dog and this heavy snow?

The canine sense of smell is many times more sensitive than our own and the Mail's assertion "the animal would normally be unlikely to smell a human presence" is bullshit either through ignorance or the the fact it weakens the story. Trained dogs routinely find skiers trapped under feet of snow after avalanches and by the story's own tacit admission, Mrs Molnar wasn't deeply covered.

"He [Ace] began nuzzling something hidden there, barking furiously and Mr Lau, who followed on his tail, then saw a gloveless hand and a woman’s face half-obscured by a black hood."

So in fact, at least some of Mrs Molnar was only covered by a thin blanket (making Ace's job a bit simpler): and what about that black hood - that sounds like outdoor clothing?

But the officer in charge, Mark Cox appears to have the key, telling the Canadian Globe and Mail, reportedly saying:

"Never even come close to something that was this unlikely. It really is incredible how she survived it. I’m shocked."

Which leaves me wondering how much experience he has at this - if he actually used those words - journos have nasty habit of, well, frankly putting words into people's mouths. The Mail is on a roll now:

"Bizarrely, police believe Mrs Molnar, who works in the nearby city of Hamilton, might have been kept alive by the snow acting as an insulating blanket."

BIZARRELY?! Dear god, doesn't anyone at the mail understand basic thermodynamics... oh wait. I take that back, of course they don't.

We know from the report that Mrs Molnar suffered frostbite to several fingers and hypothermia, which isn't that surprising, but the mail reports that she endured temperatures of -15c. Did she?

There's a couple of things at work here and the police report is right on the money. It's perhaps paradoxical that the best way to survive a blizzard is to bury yourself in snow. It's not so much the snow that kills you - it's the exposure to wind chill as the driving wind carries your body temperature away.

By actually covering yourself in fluffy white stuff (which is also full of stagnant air) you insulate your body from the effects of the wind and therefore receive some degree of protection. In fact, the insulating nature of snow means you can stay comparatively warm. Suffocation is a more likely consequence, but as the temperature drops our respiration slows so we use less of the precious air in our icy tomb.

Moreover, did anyone actually have a thermometer against Mrs Molnar's body? Of course not, those -15c temperatures (which are not all that extreme) would have been at ground level - most likely at night and probably using wind chill for effect.

While I wish Mrs Molnar a speedy recovery, I wish the Mail would try a bit harder.

Touched by a (Camera) Angel

Among the usual suspects, the Daily Fail Mail carries this story of a child who made a remarkable recovery after being touched by an Angel. The Mail says:

"Colleen Banton, from Charlotte, North Carolina, was facing the agonising decision of taking her daughter off a life-support machine when the 'miracle' occurred."

At least the Mail has included the quotes suggesting that someone down there still commands a quantum of scepticism. It goes on to quote Mrs. Banton:

On the monitor, there was this bright light,' she said. 'And I looked at it and I said, "Oh my goodness! It looks like an angel!"'

Of course, that's the only explanation. The Mail continues:

"A first attempt at capturing the image with a digital camera was unsuccessful: 'The first picture wouldn't take,' she said. The second time she succeeded, and the mother-of-two sought solace in the image while her daughter's oxygen mask was removed."

Apparently, everyone was stunned as the oxygen mask was removed and the teenager continued to breath for herself. Some two weeks later, she was fit enough to be discharged in time for her 15th birthday on Christmas day.

The Mail goes on to quote the typically religious American lady:

'If they doubt it, that's fine... But I know what I saw, and the picture's untouched. I didn't make it up. That's just something that I believe. I believe that more people have changed since this happened. I know I have. I look at things differently than I used to – because I know God is in control.'

If God's in control why was this poor child born five weeks premature with hydrocephalus? Why is it she's suffered life-threatening illness throughout her short life and why is it that tangible medicine has continued to keep her alive?

Yes, I'm a cynical bastard. So let's take a closer look a the facts which are pretty short on the ground since we only have witness statements to go on.

Even the Mail is confused:

"The unusual light appeared while her daughter Chelsea was fighting for life on a ventilator"

How do we know this light just appeared mysteriously? Simple - we don't.

All we can see is a bright light on the monitor on a picture that's already distorted by the camera angle and the goldfish bowl CRT and wide-angle of the CCTV camera.



The green lines I've added here show the approximate true lines of perspective and the purple ones trace a corner that's fairly close to the camera. I don't know the dimensions involved, in particular the width of the corridors at this junction, but you can see how distorted everything is to begin with.

So to the light. Any decent photographer will tell you bright light - or glare - is a pain in the bum. There are several types of glare - lens flare is probably the most common, but by no means the only one: and it's not what we're seeing here. This is classic overexposure bleed typically associated with electronic recording.

By roughly tracing the edge of the bleed it's easy to see how it follows the lines of the doorway.




You can see from this that the glow appears to drop away when at the edge of the painting and also slightly along the bumper rail. It follows the metal bumper on the door too.

What we have here is a reflection from a bright source just outside of the camera's view - but you already guessed that, didn't you. This is further confirmed by the way the light reflected from the area also pools on the floor.

So could it be an angel after all then - just out of shot? There's certainly a light source, but since hospitals are full of bright light sources - this is a far more tangiable explanation than the sudden appearance of a supernatural construct. The glowing effect is simply caused by the way the overexposure flare falls off.

This next image is just for fun (but watch it pop up around the net!)



This bit of Photoshoppery is courtesy of a photographer friend, but you can see how convincing it is - it took about 30 seconds to complete the illusion: and it's deliberately slightly inaccurate.

Belief is a very powerful thing. Many of us need to believe in something greater than ourselves to give our lives purpose - or to blame when things go wrong. This lady's genuine belief has distorted a very simple trick of the light into something supernatural.

So what about her daughter's miraculous recovery? That's good and I'm genuinely pleased for the family, but I doubt the story's accuracy.

Witnesses are notoriously unreliable - even without the added confusion of strong emotions and beliefs. We only have the report's word that Chelsea was at death's door. Reporters often play around with the truth to make the mundane into the fantastical.

Mundane stories don't pay their wages and they have to eat.

Misquotation, distortion and exaggeration are orders of the day if you're a hungry journalist and a mother desperately seeking answers is paydirt.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it is to keep on questioning everything you read.

Today I'm Going To Be: A Doctor

They're an odd breed, journalists.

In most professions you train for a long time to acquire the skills required and then spend years moving up the ladder.

"Experts are not born, they are hewn from the bedrock of endeavour and the granite of experience."

When I wrote that, back in the early 90s, I was considered an expert on computer that today few people have even heard of. It took many years to acquire the knowledge to be specialist in that comparatively narrow field and as a friend of mine wryly observed on me being introduced as an "expert":

Expert: an "ex" is something that was and a "spurt" is a drip under pressure.

Um... a few years later, I refined that into:

A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less. So the ultimate specialist is someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.

Richard "Holier Than Thou" Littlejohn and the cringe-making Peter Hitchens (to name two) are specialists: of the worst form - they're journalists.

The trouble is they have taken upon themselves the mantle of, well, whatever suits. One day they are doctors writing about MMR (a common theme in The Mail) another they are evolutionary biologists telling us that Darwin was wrong (Hitchens) and on yet another day, they become mystically transformed into climate experts and tell their readers that people like me are climate Nazis (Littlejohn).

Not one of these idiots possess anything remotely connected to a science degree and yet they choose to tell vulnerable people all matter of tosh they pick up unchecked from Wikipedia, or more usually thin air.

If I went to an airport and demanded to fly an jumbo to Hong Kong, I'd be escorted off the premises by security and probably handed to men in long white coats. Yet I can fly a jet - I just don't hold necessary licences. There's the small matter of those pesky months of intensive training, hideously difficult exams not to mention the £30,000+ cost.

There was a time when journalists checked their facts but somehow that's got lost to the mists of time. There was also a time when specialists were allowed to write and discuss their specialities - not any more. Now anyone with the journalist's mantle is free to write whatever bullshit they want: hell, they can even make shit up because on the (very) rare occasions they get caught, the fines are minute.

The author Mark Twain (I think) once observed that if you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed. In those wise words, I think that ignorance might just be bliss.

Even our elected politicians command less trust than the newspapers. While I'll grant you that some of our honourable members are, well a bit dodgy, at least they are subject to some degree of scrutiny and can easily lose their jobs. The same, unfortunately, is not true of most journalists.

Believe nothing - check everything.

Daily Mail: "Ming Emperor Had Swiss Timepiece"

OK, I admit I'm having a laugh at the Mail's expense, but this is the sort of dubious BS that it prints on a daily basis, so why shouldn't I?

The story now starring all over the net although I can't find an original source, is that a couple of archaeologists have found a swiss-made ringwatch in some rubble while excavating a tomb. The key bit is here, where the writer records:

"They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral.

It's fairly obvious they are mistaken. Says Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum:

'When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound.'

Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this. Perhaps it was a time traveller? But you'd have thought a couple of things would have occurred to them, notwithstanding that time travel is paradoxically impossible, the simple fact that the clumsy bastard could would have brought a more accurate electronic timepiece - not a early 20th century clockwork version.

I can see it now: "Flux capacitor: check! FTL drive: check! Antique clockwork timepiece: check!"

Oh do behave - the most worrying thing about this is that so many new sources are sufficiently slow to actually print this as news.

Let me spell it out for you O-C-C-A-M-S R-A-Z-O-R. The idea that when there are several conflicting theories, the simplest one is usually the correct one.

Christ, these people get on my nerves.

Child Dies From MMR! Oh, wait, No It Didn't

I don't really have the medical know-how to cover this one in the detail that my respected colleague, Ben Goldacre can so I'll let him give you the gory details.

Bad Science

If you don't fancy reading Ben's post (which is detailed and excellent) I'll give you the skinny.

As ever, the usual suspects reported (wrongly) that a child had died after being given MMR as this report in Metro demonstrates.

MMR was safe before Andrew Wankfield suggested otherwise and it is safe now. Get over it.

Daily Mail In Dramatic MMR U-Turn

The Mail's online edition carries news that, "There have been more than 1,000 measles cases so far this year – putting Britain at risk of a deadly epidemic, health officials say."

Well there's a fucking surprise! If you don't give vaccine to your children, there's a bloody good chance they'll become infected and statistically, if MMR uptake drops year-on-year as it did thanks to (among others) The Daily Mail's grossly inaccurate harping, the chances become ever greater.

Of course, this isn't really a U-Turn.

Seems like every time the "MMR Causes Autism" debate crops up, The Mail is there screeching at the middle classes.

Surely The Mail isn't that bad, is it?

Oh yes it is...

This is the "respectable" newspaper that for years carried the "Frankenstein Food Watch" with it's stock picture of a guy in some Hazmat suit and effectively fucked up GM food research for decades. This is the paper that let an idiot journalist write a massive piece about how "Darwin got it wrong". That would be Charles Darwin, father of the Theory of Evolution.

GM food has a bit of a scary label largely because the people that fiddle with genes work in white coats in sterile conditions, but there's no evidence at all that it's harmful: and worse than that, what precisely do you think GM does?

Let me tell you this much: it doesn't make living things by grafting dead things together like Victor Frankenstein did. It doesn't hang limp bits of barley from the top of dark castles in the middle of massive thunderstorms in the hope that a passing bolt of lightning will bring it back to life.

What it can do is increase the plant's resistance to disease; or its nutritional value. It can make a plant that can thrive in the harshest of conditions and still crop well.

It could help solve the world's hunger problem.

But the Daily Mail think GM is playing god - so fuck the starving children in Africa, we'll send them money instead which their corrupt government officials will use to line their own nests.

Way to go, Daily Mail.

Dail Mail Wows at Downs Increase: Wrong Again!

Research for the BBC, reports the Mail has resulted in: "An increasing number of women are choosing to bring a Down's syndrome child into the world rather than have an abortion. More babies are being born with the genetic condition than before screening was introduced 20 years ago, figures show. And research reveals that many parents believe the social stigma associated with Down's has been removed and the quality of life for these babies has improved."

But as my fellow blogger, Dr Ben Goldacre (that's a GP type doctor, not a quack) at badscience.net observes, the real factor is obscured but the simple application of a statistic.

Live Down's Syndrome births are up by about 4% so that means, according to the Mail, that more parents (mothers in particular are choosing to keep a child with this moderate genetic disorder). As usual no one bothers to check for other contributing factors and the anti-abortion (anti-choice) leaning Mail is delighted at this news.

And as usual, they are wrong.

The simple fact is because of the changes in modern life, women are choosing to have their children much later in life. In fact, in medicine, a woman is considered to be a geriatric mother if she becomes pregnant at over 30.

Holy crap!

This isn't as staggering as it sounds, we're all living a very long time compared with our recent ancestors largely due to modern medicine and better diet.

As abhorrent as it sounds to us in the modern West, what we rightly regard as children today, would have been parents at the ripe old age of perhaps 11 or 12 only a few thousand years ago. Mind you, they would also have likely been dead before they hit 35 too.

Nature didn't intend for the human animal to live as long as it does; so by choosing to fuck with the natural order, we're playing dice with our offspring. No one is sure what causes Downs syndrome, but what we do know is that the instance rises dramatically with maternal age; paternal age is also though to be a factor although less so.

For a woman usual age, the chance of conceiving a child with Down's is about 1-in-1600 but by 43, the chance of is about 1-in-40. Of those women (of all age groups) who do, about 9 from every 10 actually terminate the pregnancy.

Since more women are selfishly putting their careers first than ever before, there's been a dramatic upsurge in Down's conceptions - NOT a reduction in terminations.

The more you put in, the more you get out - it's so simple even I can understand it, which is probably why the fuckwits at the Mail won't hire me.

Will the Mail be publishing a correction? Fuck no!

Measles Back: Quick, Vaccinate!

Measles in the UK has reached a peak of over 1000 cases in the last 13 years. The problem in Cheshire is so bad that the local health authority has ordered mass vaccination of local children.

While most children recover, about 1 in 10 will require hospital treatment and as I've pointed out in this column previously, some will suffer brain damage or even die.

Are you listening Jenny "I know better" McCarthy? Are you listening Tony "I'm not saying" Blair? How about you, Dr. Andrew "scaremongering" Wakefield?

Will the Daily Mail apologise and admit the years of its spent promoting the insidious, unproven bullshit about MMR where all a mistake?

Will they fuck!

MMR is generally safe: as safe as any other vaccine - and probably safer than many. All vaccines have some risks, but you have to balance that against the very real risk of death from measles or problems mumps and rubella will cause to adults in years to come.

Vaccination saves lives as much as MMR doesn't cause autism (or IBS). It's simple: your children can't make the choice so it's your responsibililty. If they die from measles related disease, their blood is on the hands of those who refused the vaccination and those who promoted the lies against it.

Jenny McCarthy is pretty. Stupid

McCarthy is pretty and full of a sense of her own self-worth - and that's a problem.

Jenny believes in god (oh shit!) and she further believes that autism can be caused by the MMR vaccine (double-shit with ice-cream!) and further to that it can be cured (FUCK NO!)

But only if you make a pact with the almighty, according to Jen!

As a high-functioning Asperger's sufferer who didn't receive an MMR jab (because it wasn't invented then) I can honestly say I'm sick of "famous" people who try to lord it over the rest of us with ideas based on junk science that has been roundly shot down in flames: many, many times.

Yet still papers (read: "rags") like the UK's Daily Mail - one of the most pernicious spreaders of bullshit dressed up as serious journalism - still refuse to admit that Dr. Andrew Wakefield was a twat. His entirely flawed research (on the say-so of a few concerned patients) was motivated by greed and the whole thing is a crock.

Children die of measles every time there is an outbreak, yet more will go blind, deaf and suffer varying degrees of brain damage and mumps is fucking nasty - particularly in adult men; rubella causes serious defects in unborn children.

But Jenny "I Know Better Because I Is Famous" McCarthy won't be dissuaded.

I'm truly sorry to learn that her child is affected; but if he is truly affected by autism there isn't a proper doctor on the planet who can cure it. You can live with high-functioning Aspergers and milder forms of autism because it's a spectrum. It goes all the way from light grey where I exist through to the blackest depth of ... well, whatever it is that goes on inside the minds of those seriously affected. It's a very wide chasm between mild and serious autism; rather like stubbing your toe to having every bone in your body crushed.

Jenny won't accept that - even if some poor (educated) person tries to tell her she won't listen.

www.stopjenny.com

I just wish Andrew Wakefield would grow a pair and admit he fucked up. Maybe then this would show some signs of going away so we can get on with having normal(ish) lives and the parents/carers of sufferers wouldn't have to cling to an artificial hope.

But the damage is already done. Wakefield and those who follow him have blood on their hands; and the "wake" will continue to rattle on through generations as parents refuse a life-saving inoculation and their children suffer as a result.