Intl AIDS Conference Calls for Decriminalisation of HIV Transmission

Various activists, academics and politicians during the International AIDS Conference criticized that many countries these days criminalize HIV transmission. The argument is essentially that the law is a bad means to deploy in order to achieve public health objectives. One reason for criminalizing HIV transmission is of course the hope that one might be able to deter some infected people from having unsafe sex. The folks wanting to decriminalize HIV transmission believe that the deterrence effect doesn't work. Frankly, I cannot see how that could be demonstrated one way or another. The deterrence effect of the criminal law has been demonstrated time and again, so I wonder why we should buy into the claim that in the case of sex it doesn't work.

Hey, perhaps it doesn't, but if that is so, what's so terribly wrong with society deciding to punish someone who knowingly subjected someone else to the risk of catching a serious chronic illness? I could see that an argument could probably be made for sexual encounters among consenting adults that, say, pick each other up in a bar some night, where both volunteer to have unsafe sex, no deception re one's HIV status takes place, no questions are being asked and a transmission takes place. I think here we'd probably have a case of harm to self. At the very least we have a case where someone arguably consented to the risk of catching a sexually transmitted illness (as AIDS is). These sorts of happenstances seem to make up the bulk of transmissions and I have not yet seen anyone running to police in order to get their one-night-stand encounter prosecuted. By and large people accept responsibility for their conduct in such circumstances, and so they should.

Truth be told the few cases that have been prosecuted across the world had to do with folks who behaved overwhelmingly truly appallingly to their partners (and not in the sense of one-night stand partner, but in the sense of husband, wife, long-term boyfriend, long-term girlfriend). You know, stories like a 25 year old guy who knew to be HIV infected and insisted on not using condoms with his 15 year old girlfriend. I am at a loss why human rights types folks think that it is a bad idea to criminalize such conduct. For the sake of the argument, even if the deterrence effect of such punishment would really fail, why would it be so unjust to punish such conduct? What's so different about HIV and AIDS that we should not aim to police such harm to others?

One thing I find truly annoying about these campaigners: With a straight face they'd pronounce variously that we shouldn't 'criminalize HIV' or we shouldn't 'criminalize people with HIV'. It goes without saying that nobody anywhere in the world has as yet attempted to either criminalize HIV or people living with the virus. What people in most countries have been saying is this: if you got the bug and you behave in harmful ways towards uninfected people by means of subjecting them to unreasonable risks through reckless behavior, we will punish you. So, what is punished is the harmful conduct, not the virus itself or anyone who happens to be infected but behaves sensibly.

African Union at it again and again and again

That useless outfit of African diplomacy, the African Union is at it again. It has put on hold Mauritania's membership due to the coup that took place there. Any wild guess why the coup (plural, coups) that took place in Zimbabwe never led to a suspension of that country and its kleptocratic leadership? Same ol same ol I'd think...

Don't buy anymore Random House (US) books and products

The US based publishing house Random House (owned by German conglomerate Bertelsmann) has just pulled the book 'The Jewel of Medina' by Sherry Jones off the shelves. It's essentially a story about the Prophet Muhammad's child bride A'isha. As with all novels (as opposed to history books) the author reportedly described some sex scenes between M and A'isha. Of course nobody as been there when/if it happened, so nobody could possibly know. It's a novel after all. For what it's worth the bits and piece that I have seen seemed innocent enough, but then, I'm a small 'l' liberal when it comes to matters sex. The reason given for withdrawing the book is not that it's a bad novel, but that it could (sic!) be (according to Random House) offensive to some (sic!) Muslims, and that it "could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment".

One wonders ... most atheists probably couldn't publish with Random House any longer either, after all, there could always be a small fanatic minority of believers that could react violently. If that is sufficient these days for a mainstream publishing house to execute censorship, we might as well call it a day as far as freedom of expression in liberal democracies is concerned!

Worse in a way, the impact of this decision on writers surely must be some kind of self-censorship. After all, if you know that your content covering religions or religious figureheads could be controversial, you also know that likely you won't be able to sell it to mainstream publishers - well, at least you'd have to be stupid trying to sell it to Random House. My conclusion: for the time being I won't be buying any Random House products (ironically, Rushdie's stuff is still among them - well, I assume that his work could not possible incite violence among a small minority of religious fundamentalists ... or something like that).

Enjoy

• http://www.silobreaker.com/DocumentReader.aspx?Item=5_888363532
• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/sports/olympics/31china.html
• http://china.hrw.org/
• http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/07/31/china19517.htm
  
• http://www.amnesty.org/en/china-olympics
• http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=174
• http://www.olympicwatch.org/
  

An HIV Vaccine and Big Pharma

Wow, 22,000 AIDS scientists, operatives and activists are gathering in Mexico to celebrate their disease. Well, good on them, of all the jobs that they could have chosen, AIDS is not an entirely worthless kinda thing, and yet, ain't it odd the role that big pharma plays in it all? Many, if not most AIDS NGOs are to a significant extent (or entirely) funded by big pharma. All sorts of panelists are flown in by big pharma to speak. Scientists' research more often than not is funded by big pharma. You might say that that's bothersome, but not such a big deal, given that big pharma and the activists have a lot in common these days. Initially big pharma was hated because it priced drugs out of many peoples' research, today it offers cheaper drugs that in turn are guaranteed huge sales thru programmes such as PEPFAR. Still, about 70%of people who could clinically benefit from AIDS medicines have no affordable and reliable access. It is entirely unclear whether the roll-out of medicines in developing countries will be sustainable over generations to come. In a way this l ooks like a win-win situation for big pharma, ever more people get on their medicines, many of them in the global south, funded by taxpayers in Western countries. All is well then, or isn't it? Well, it only looks like it.

There is one area where big pharmas investment has been negligible: HIV vaccine and microbicide research. There's no big surprise in that. You can't seriously expect these companies to produce an HIV vaccine, given that they know full-well that that would rob them of millions of customers requiring life-long care. No way they will ever meaningfully contribute to HIV vaccine development. It's a bit like asking OPEC to invent an alternative to oil for us . And so it's left to the haphazard activities of the Global Fund, the two Bill's and their friends and other such groups. We neither have a serious concerted global effort funded by the governments of the world (our representatives...) nor by big pharma.

No wonder the participants of the international AIDS travel circus can look forward to many more such events to come. Courtesy of government and industry inaction we won't be seeing a vaccine any time soon. Even better, with treatment activists mostly in the backpocket of international organizations and funded to a large extent by industry, don't expect too much pressure from them either. Hey, and while I'm at it, the same holds true for plenty of other ailments that could be prevented efficiently if a vaccine was around. Serious rethinking is required as far as drug R&D financing is concerned.

Sex between strangers

Here's a true story my friend Anita Kleinsmidt kindly forwarded to me... enjoy

Was it rape or was it not? That was the question the Pretoria High
Court had to deal with.

But as it turned out, it was in fact a case of mistaken identity, says a report in The Star. The 'victim' is a Pretoria woman in her 20s. The man had received a 10-year jail sentence for the one night of passion he had with her, but the High Court intervened and acquitted him of any wrong-doing. About three years ago a man in a car asked the woman for her telephone number. Without looking at him, she gave him her number and walked on. This was the start of a phone relationship. They eventually agreed to meet and the man, known as Jacky, arranged to pick up his new love. She in turn - without knowing what Jacky looked like as they had never met - waited for him at the restaurant with her overnight bag in tow. It emerged during the trial in the Pretoria Magistrates' Court that a man walked towards her and hugged her. She testified that they later had repeated sex that night and when she switched on her phone the next morning, she discovered a message from the 'real Jacky'. Kenneth Vilakazi (30) was subsequently arrested and later convicted for the rape in the lower court. He received a 10-year jail sentence, but turned to the High Court to appeal his conviction.

Vilakazi maintained that they had consensual sex. The woman said he was not the man she thought he was. She claimed he misrepresented himself to her, but the court disagreed. Judge Cathy Satchwell and Acting Judge JC Labuschagne found that the 'victim' had made the
mistake herself. The court found that they were all strangers and it was a case of one stranger having sex with another stranger.

AIDS Talkfest on the Road

The International AIDS Conference is again on the road, this time in Mexico City (watch carefully whether the surplus sero-conversions that go with that event match those resulting from the last AIDS conference, or whether they're higher or lower - funny counting game). Anyway, more seriously, there are some interesting issues the talk fest crowd is going on about.

For starters, 150+ HIV vaccine trials crashed not exactly without a trace, rather in quite a few of them those participants randomized into the active arm were becoming more (instead of less) susceptible to picking up HIV. So, both HIV vaccine and HIV microbicide trials have hit a wall of sorts.

Interestingly, however, there's possibly some light at the end of the tunnel. A few months back a team of HIV specialists in Switzerland announced that in their opinion people on antiretrovirals are no more likely to transmit HIV than are people who use condoms. The reason for this is that the medicines reduce an infected person's viral load to such low levels that it's next to impossible to pass the bug on to sexual partners. There's all sorts of caveats, but this matters in the face of rising STI rates among people in high HIV prevalence groups in a whole bunch of countries, including Germany, the USA and many others.

Well, fascinating ethical questions abound: Should one tell people on HIV medicines that their risk is that low or would that mean that they would take unreasonable risks - eg by having more unsafe sex with more people than they would otherwise have? Should we put people very early on in their infection on HIV medicines, for public health reasons as opposed to reasons to do with their medical care? What should we do if there ever arose a conflict between public health interests and patient care? Considering that a substantial number of people on medicines are not as compliant in terms of how they should be taking them, and considering that this leads to more drug resistant mutations of the virus, at what point in time would the early introduction of drugs be outweighed by these undesirable consequences? What are the implications for the criminalization of HIV transmission? If someone duly takes her anti HIV drugs and her partner - not knowing about her infection -picks up the bug anyway, would it be acceptable to punish her?

Difficult new questions to ponder.

Help - Hilfe - Hannes Wader

I'm sure outside German speaking countries nobody has ever heard of an old unreconstructed Communist German folk musician by the name Hannes Wader. Well, for better or worse, being the hopeless romantic that I am, I have been trying forever to get my hands on a digital copy of one particular song 'Leben einzeln und frei', but I am seemingly unable to download the thing. Anyone able to help?

Those Nigerian scam artists are so funny...

Check out the message that I received today! It is truly hilarious!

You got to give it to these Nigerian scam artists, they know how to make involuntarily fun even of themselves!

Mind you, it's probably an open question as to whether Nigerian scam artists or the UN's notoriously corrupt system have creamed more money off the world community...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


FROM THE DESK OF
DR BAN KI-MOON
Secretary-General (UNITED NATIONS)

Attn: Beneficiary,

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?, You may not understand why this mail came to you.

We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with United Nations, European Union and all the other concern parties whose citizens has lost million of Dollars to Nigerian/African Scam Known as 419. This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$750,000.00(US$.75Million)

This includes every foreign contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc. We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

You are advised to contact Dr Justin Williams, Director Legal Services of DUE PROCESS COMMISSION Nigeria for your check to be issued, the check will be drawn from J.P MORGAN CHASE BANK. as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your Check/ International Bank Draft of US$750,000.00 This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose Ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.Contact DR JUSTIN WILLIAMS For him to sent you your check immediately.

Person to Contact: DR JUSTIN WILLIAMS

Email: drjustinwilliams11@gmail.com

Phone: 234-702-5339391

note: you will only be request to send the sum of US$78 for shipment and delivery of the bank draft to Dr Justin Williams.

Thanks and God bless you and your family. Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft. with kindest regards from United Nations: making the world a better place.

Regards,


Ban Ki-Moon.
Secretary-General
United Nations

Free Doctors Kamiar and Arash Alaei

Physicians for Human Rights is running a campaign on behalf of two physicians who are experts on HIV prevention. The two have been detained without charges by Iranian security forces since late June. Their whereabouts are unknown.

Campaign information and a petition are at: http://actnow-phr.org/campaign/iran_free_the_docs/

Ode to Via Rail

There's great news in Canada. That miserable excuse for an airline, Air Canada, is closing quite a few of its bases. Terrible enough for its employees, but no doubt the chickens come home to roost for an organisation that has made offensively bad customer service the hallmark of its operations. These days there's plenty of desperate airlines out there and customers don't have to put up with Air Canada's nonsense. I wonder how many Canadians, quietly or not so quietly, are pro-actively boycotting Air Canada (as I do) after one too many bad experiences.

Anyway, compare that to Via Rail, that delightful Canadian rail company. I love Via Rail to bits. Mind you, the trains are not what us spoiled Europeans expect in terms of high-tech and speed, but they take you faster to your destination than a trip in the car, the food is nice, service usually impeccable, and they're remarkably frequently on time. Unlike Air Canada, which these days thinks nothing of cancelling your long-haul flight a few hours before your departure, using 'Act of God' as its rationale for not reimbursing you for additional expenses and inconvenience, Via staff here in Kingston were hugely apologetic for a 10 min delay of a Toronto - Montreal train. - 10 min... that's nothing.

The only nasty thing Via Rail has done recently is to replace a delightful red wine (Ontario produced at that) that came in little glass bottles with overseas made Tetra Pak products. Now, if that's done for environmental reasons, let's get some facts straight: transporting wine all the way from Spain to Canada is probably environmentally worse than using Ontario made produce. Also, 90% of bottles these days are being reccycled in Canada, while much less of the Tetra Pack stuff is finding its way into recycling schemes. In short: it is doubtful that the 'green' Tetra Pack scheme Via has come up with works.

However, unlike Air Canada, which happily SELLS you stinking hamburgers on long distance flights, Via Rail offers sandwiches these days that even have your 1:5 portion of veggies included. Good on ya Via. The other thing about Via is hat their frequent traveller points system actually works. I called them the other day and asked that some of my accumulated miles be used for a free trip to Montreal. No problem, did it on the phone in less than 5 min. Try the same with Air Canada frequent flyer miles. Almost certainly you won't be going where you'd like to go. But then, that's even true if you buy a ticket from that outfit. Guess what, Via didn't even levy fuel, taxes, looking-at-train and touching-seat surcharges on my free trip, as Air Canada would have done.

So, people, use the train whenever you can. It's environmentally friendlier than any other alternative that we have currently and you don't have to put up with the kind of crap airlines like Air Canada heap on you.

Rainbow nation in action ... ctd

A survey of about 270,000 school kids in South Africa, aka the Rainbow Nation, published today in the International Journal for Equity in Health revealed some pretty devastating figures. Of the male respondents (about 130,000) 44% reported to have been raped.

The medical industrial complex hates losing control over patients

Germans have an apt word to describe the knowledge professionals of all colors deploy to maintain their stranglehold on patients and clients. It's essentially about control. Lawyers would hate nothing more than if we suddenly understood their legal jargon. Medical doctors and the authorities maintaining their Herrschaftswissen (loosely translated with 'knowledge to rule' I presume) are similar creatures. I have recently investigated to what extent people at risk for HIV infection can take some control over their risks and lives back. What's happening in Canada is not very different to many other countries, but no less unjustifiable.

So, let me start with the easy and arguably uncontroversial one: Rapid HIV testing. People who, for on reason or other, have run an HIV infection risk can either go to their GP, get counselled and a prescription to do a test in a lab. So, first they have to wait to get a doctor's appointment. In the 150k people city where I live ten-thousands have no GP due to a shortage of doctors. Anyway, I digress. They finally get the prescription for the test. Well, next they need to go to a laboratory to get the testing done. Don't naively think they'd be able to get their test results straight from the lab. Nope, no chance. When the lab has eventually done its work it sends the result to the GP and the person who got tested needs to wait for another appointment to find out the result. Weeks will by now have passed, and so plenty of incentives have accumulated not to jump thru the various loops and hoops, and just not do the test or get the result. Testing is hugely important, because timely life-preserving treatment relies on knowledge of a given patient's infection.

There's a way around this, these days rapid tests exist that could permit you to get a result within half an hour. A perfectly reasonable ethical argument could be mounted in favor of having this test available OTC (over the counter, without prescription). If nothing else, such a move would hand control back to people at risk for HIV infection. This, however flies in the face of everything the medical-industrial complex stands for. So, no easy access to this test for you and me. -- As an aside, and I am talking from personal experience here, this is the country where acyclovir, a substance used to fight quite efficiently those bloody blisters many of us have on-and-off on their lips, cannot be bought OTC without a prescription either. I'm sure you'll appreciate the irony that One-Pounds shops in the UK sell it to you by the gallon if you wish. No all-important doctor's prescription necessary in the land of John Stuart Mill... -- Anyway, back to the rapid tests. You can do the rapid HIV test in Ontario at various anonymous testing sites. Access to the test is available through various public health facilities and clinics in the province. However, to ensure that nothing is ever as straightforward and as easy as it should be, that isn't made easy either (try finding information about testing facilities on the web at the time of me writing this ranting, and you'll see what I mean). I checked with one facility in Toronto, its waiting lists are more than 2 weeks long and they do not make appointments beyond that. In other words, there's a significant unmet demand by health conscious people who are at (self-identified) risk of HIV infection. The needs are nowhere met in any appreciable manner by Ontario's public health care system.

My hunch is that the reason for why these waiting lists exist has to do with the counselling hoops and loops people who want to get tested have to jump through each time they have a test. Historically, these hoops and loops were designed to ensure that people understood the test and its consequences, and, indeed, to give them an opportunity to say yay or nay to the test (informed consent or informed refusal). Ie they were an empowerment tool brought about essentially by AIDS activists. Indeed, there was a time where we had the test but no treatment, so it wasn't clear what the value of knowing was (at least knowing wasn't a cost neutral, or no-brainer type thing). Well, today we have good treatments available and it is in an infected person's best interest to know. For better or worse, the testing regime available in the public health care system falters in the face of very significant demand (even fails to inform those at risk about the availability of rapid testing). If you think that this is a problem in Canada alone... you're way off! Singaporeans struggle with the same problem of insufficient capacity to deliver rapid tests. All that's needed to be done really is to take the access control out of the hands of the health care system and permit access OTC. But that would mean relinquishing control. And that's not gonna happen in your or my lifetime.

Now, you may or may not have heard of post exposure (to HIV) prophylaxis (PEP). I have been working in medical schools for most of my academic life, so I learned that PEP is a pretty efficient means to reduce an infection risk AFTER exposure has taken place. Medical students at my school in Johannesburg got it frequently after needle stick injuries and so did many of my colleagues for the same reason. Btw, if there ever was an efficient tool of persuading people to protect themselves against HIV infection it's probably to let them have access to AIDS medicines for a couple of weeks (a typical course of PEP). Experience the side-effects of those medicines and ask yourself whether it's really really worth it :). Mind you, you will get over those at some point during the course of the treatment, but they will hit you first.

One way of taking control over one's life back, to some extent, would be to have PEP available as a last resort if one belonged to a high-risk group (ie people belonging to groups in society where the prevalence of HIV is significantly higher than among the rest of the population - eg gay men, IV drug users - possibly if you live in a developed country, migrants from subsaharan Africa). Say, you have sex with someone belonging to an identified group with a higher than average HIV prevalence. You duly use your condom, and, bummer, the thing breaks, slips off or does any number of unsafe things that ideally shouldn't have happened. Any GP worth her money would tell you that unless you can be certain that your sex partner is HIV negative, you MUST get on PEP ASAP, latest within 48 hours. So, the theory goes, you leave your bedroom (likely in the middle of the night) trek down to your local hospital and you pray that there is someone about who knows what to give to you. Common sense and respect for us as persons would demand that access to such medicines should be available by means of prescription (ie you could have it at home). Giving people easy and stress-free access to such means to protect themselves, of course, would be simply too easy and too obvious a solution, hence the required mid-nightly panic attack visit to the local hospital (if there's one where you live).

So, AIDS activists, if there's any left that are not salaried part of the very same medical-industrial complex, there's plenty of work to do!

Holy Catholic Agony

DSC00940
Originally uploaded by udo schuklenk.

As seen in Manhattan in 2008...

Selling out Universities

How about a Pfizer Chair in Bioethics? With Pfizer's track record in Nigeria and elsewhere, the company has fallen over itself by way of linking into biomedical ethics. For better or worse, I do know that the company has begun funding biomedical ethics positions in the developing world. Anyway, I'm not after Pfizer today really. I came across a post on a German language science blog indicating that the Charite, one of the country's most prestigious hospitals and the teaching hospital of Humboldt University's (Berlin) medical school, has just appointed a Chair (ie an externally funded professor in this case) in 'alternative medicine'. The appointee will dedicate her work to the study of homeopathy (a quack form of medicine that essentially relies on an active substance being sufficiently diluted in water till nothing is left of it), acupuncture and Quigong, some Chinese quackery. Well, the thing is that we know already from study after study that homeopathy offers nothing much other than a placebo effect, yet the Humboldt University in its press release indicates what its Chair is meant to achieve. The appointment of the Chair is meant to diminish the skepticism of mainstream medicine toward homeopathy. There's a reason for this, much like with Pfizer's bioethics sponsorship in developing countries, the Chair is funded by a vested interest group, the Karl and Veronica Carstens Foundation. The Foundation is named after the late German President Karl Carstens, much like Prince Charles in the UK a fan of anything 'alternative' and 'complementary'. The Foundation's main objective is to mainstream homeopathy and other methods of 'natural healing'.

What is remarkable about all of this is that a leading German university has agreed to establish a Chair in Medical Quackery that is designed to integrate medical quackery into mainstream medicine, because it received external funding for that specific purpose. Well, this at least according to the well referenced science blog entry I mentioned earlier. The question, of course, is whether this act of intellectual prostitution is any worse then the regular selling out of universities to pharmaceutical companies, religious foundations and others.

Justice heals

For your information an appeal by

"JUSTICE HEALS!"


Yesterday Paraguayan lawyer, Human Rights activist and torture survivor, Dr.
Martin Almada, declared to cease taking his medication, in protest against
several attempts to silence him, either through legal charges against him or
recently as well through questioning his mental abilities by the court.

Dr. Martín Almada, has been awarded with the alternative nobel prize, for
his outstanding revelations on the "Operation Condor", a transboundary
criminal network, run by Latin American security forces during the 70ies and
80ies, to localize, abduct, torture and kill their opponents. In 1992 Dr.
Almada located the so called "Archives of Terror", containing thousands of
files proving the operation.
Dr. Martín Almada, is a survivor of the Operation Condor. He has been
kidnapped and tortured by the joint security forces of the Southern Cone.
His wife Celestina Perez was killed by the Stroessner regime in 1974. Since
that time he suffers from the consequences of his traumatic experiences,
receiving medication for his relief.

Since two years former torturers, which have been denounced by Dr. Martín
Almada, try to persecute, harass and silence him through charges before the
Paraguayan courts. Now Juan Manuel Morales, having been denounced by Dr.
Martín Almada as being a former agent of the Stroessner dictatorship,
demanded a psyciatric examination of Dr. Almada within the frame of a court
case, Morales is running against Dr. Almada for so called "diffamation".

To protest against this attemt to pathologize him, and to question his
mental abilities, Dr. Almada declared to the judge and to the forensic
psychiatrist, that from now on he will stop taking any of the drugs he
used to take for his post-traumatic suffering.
Dr. Almada underlines his decision by reminding, that since more than 30
years he kept claiming an effective medicament to cure his wounds, a
medicament which is called: JUSTICE!
"It is not the past, which divides the Paraguayan and Latin American
family", Dr. Almada declared, "but the lack of justice." And he adds, that
JUSTICE IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF HEALTH FOR ALL THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN VICTIMS OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS.

For more details see attached declaration in Spanish.
For additional information on Dr. Martín Almada see:
http://www.gerechtigkeit-heilt.de/texte/vita_almada.html

Prison for Mr Al-Bashir

Th Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir has been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal on the count of crimes against humanity for the genocide he has organized in Darfur. How very neat. The prosecutor at the Tribunal is seeking Al-Bashir's arrest with an international arrest warrant. Sudan's president is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur by ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.There is hope that on the odd occasion justice is done when individual heads of state commit large-scale crimes against humanity and no oil interests are involved!

Responsibility to Protect

The UN Security Council's decision to do nothing about Zimbabwe is remarkable and it isn't. It isn't remarkable to anyone who considers the UN to be a by and large useless, and deeply corrupt organization, the disappearance of which would barely be noticed by most people except those who have their hands in the UN salary troughs. Of course, the UN can only be so good as its weakest links, and there's plenty of weak links. South Africa's voice on the Security Council has fairly routinely been supportive of the worst criminals as far as human rights violating states go. China couldn't possibly bring itself to issue a vote condemning Mugabe's junta because it's in bed, pardon, in business with the kleptocratic dictator and his minions. Indeed, just today the BBC reports that China, despite an official UN arms embargo, has busily sold weapons to the Sudanese regime. It is still training the Sudanese army in the use of these weapons. These weapons have demonstrably been used to murder innocent people in the ongoing genozide in Darfur.

Thankfully many heads of states, from George W Bush to Angela Merkel are falling over each other to promise to the Chinese government that they will attend the opening of the olympic games. It is business as usual. So, surely, if permanent members of the UN Security Council are actively supporting governments like the Zimbabwean and Sudanese, we cannot seriously expect the Council to act in any meaningful way. Indeed, if it acted against Zimbabwe, why should China not be next on its list. It seems then that we cannot seriously expect the Security Council to enforce the UN's 'Responsibility to Protect' doctrine - after all, we all know the saying 'don't throw stones while you're sitting in the glasshouse'. China, South Africa (and its President Thabo Mbeki) are anything but genuinely concerned about civil rights and the duty to protect citizens of UN member states from serious abuses of such. So, Bob Madhatter, go on... nobody is gonna stop you until someone finds oil in Zim. No wonder you declared, in view of the international community's failure to deal with you and your fellow thugs, that you're 'happy'. So would I be, if I was in your shoes.

The religious 'conscience' again

Another incredible case from the UK. A religious fundamentalist whose day job is working as a marriage registrate refused to marry gay couples. An employment tribunal agreed that her employer (the local council) had harassed her by asking her to marry gay couples against her religious beliefs.

I know, I have been there before (and will be there again), but I just cannot get my head around the fact that she can't just get fired for not doing her job. I mean, people don't come to see her as a religious fundamentalist but as a public official. She's entitled to go home, wash her hands and whatnot to clean herself of the dirt that gay people and other 'sinners' are undoubtedly in her view, but how can anyone in authority permit such stuff to influence her professional conduct? It's utterly absurd. What if gay folks that happen to be marriage registrates refused to wed religious fundamentalists? Or a racist marriage magistrate who refuses to wed mixed-ethnicity couples? If recourse to 'conscience' is sufficient, surely it's a free for all... If the magistrate in question doesn't feel like marrying people that are legally entitled to marry, she's unfit to do her job and should get fired.

What's wrong with female bishops in the Anglican Church

Fascinating, the Anglicans are not only split over homosexuality (something that I can understand, seeing that the God they created has been conjured up in such a way as to dislike gay people), they're also split over female bishops. Now, bishops are senior management type people in that church. They're allowed to wear much more colourful dresses in public then the average priest. So, one would have thought that the guys in the church would keep quiet about women in senior management positions as long as no one questions their right to wear dresses in public. Well, it seems their dress envy is sufficiently strong for many of those middle-aged and old men to campaign against women wearing the same colourful dresses in public. How amusing.

Academic shenanigans - Impact factors and such

Conflict of interest declaration: I am an editor of two academic journals published by a commercial publisher.

The 'standing' of academic journals in the scientific community is these days evaluated by two sets of criteria.

The old-fashioned one: A journal's relative importance is measured by peer esteem, ie how many really really famous people (let's call them peers) publish in a given journal, how long does it take the journal to review a manuscript (inefficiency of the review process is here taken as a measure of the journal's importance), how many manuscripts are being rejected (if you publish only one manuscript per year, you'd probably be the most competitive to get into, ergo best journal) and so on and so forth. Very much like the ongoing evaluation of graduate philosophy programs on a US based website that relies on peer gossip (ie someone chooses someone else as a peer, enough people play along, voila, you have a 'system' of evaluation). Most, if not all of this old-fashioned stuff really is quasi-religious in nature and can safely be discarded.

The supposedly scientific one: Well, Thomson Scientific has more or less cornered the market with its ISI. What they do, roughly, is to measure a journal's impact based on how frequently an article is cited in a 2-year period after its publication - that's then weighted against the overall number of papers published in the journal in the same time frame. This, of course, equals importance and quality with citations - ie a quantitative measure. Disciplines like medicine and law are well served by this, because it's part and parcel of those disciplines' academic papers to reference meticulously. It also helps, of course, that many more people work in such disciplines then in, say theology, so there's more people's publications, and more citations going around. The result is that such journals tend to rank much higher in terms of impact than even the best theology journal. It's also easy to manipulate this impact factor game, simply by publishing content that is likely to be sufficiently controversial to generate lots and lots of citations. Someone pointed out, rightly so, that the paper published by the fraudulent South Korean cloning guy, that has since been withdrawn, helped the journal's impact factor, because it gets cited by everyone as an example of scientific misconduct.

None of this is really newsworthy, however. What is newsworthy, is this: Journal editors at scientific-research based Rockefeller University in New York City have bought data sets including their journals from Thomson to replicate their findings (ie their journals' impact factor). They could not reproduce Thomson's results, using even Thomson's own method. Worse, on request Thomson was unable to verify its own results. This is of serious concern, because many academics, myself included, despite misgivings about the counting game to which Thomson reduces academic excellence, thought that that is the best there is. Well, it turns out that it is clearly a very unreliable best there is.

Perhaps it is time to junk the ISI and go along with the Rockefeller scientists' suggestion that ' publishers to make their citation data available in a publicly accessible database, and thus free this important information from Thomson Scientific's (and other companies') proprietary stranglehold.' This seems a sensible proposition. Surely it cannot be permitted to continue that academics' careers depend on proprietary commercial data that cannot be independently verified, and that - as the Rockefeller people have shown - cannot even be verified by the company itself.

Should we expect sexual partners to tell us about health risks?

Let's face it, many, if not most of us are hopelessly romantic when it comes to relationships, certainly new ones. Fresh in love (not to say sexually stimulated) we offer our heart to whoever it is we (well, our biochemistry/hormones) have decided to fall for. The evidence is on the table, that this is the moment where for very many of us our best intentions and precautions in terms of STI (yay, sexually transmitted illnesses) prevention fly out of the window. A study published this month in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases (yay, STD) reports that about 70% of us would consider our partner 'safe' if he or she was otherwise generally trustworthy. For better or worse, very very often we are wrong. HIV has reportedly long been delighted that we are as naive on this as we are, because it permits the bug to continue spreading happily ever after. Even in high-risk groups such as gay men the pandemic continues quite efficiently to spread. In the USA the CDC reports data from from 33 states. They show that between 2001 and 2006 new HIV diagnoses increased by 12% annually among men who have sex with men (13 to 24 years of age) and by 15% per year among black men in the same age group.

So, is it reasonable to expect our sexual partners to tell us about health risks such as HIV (ie that they're at risk, but don't know, or that they know to be HIV infected)? Difficult call, isn't it? On the one hand, there's plenty of good ethical as well as public health reasons for being honest with our partners about our STI risks. Successful relationships, all other things being equal, depend on honesty and our ability to trust our partner. It's unacceptable to knowingly subject a loved one (anyone, probably) to serious risk of bodily harm (that's what an HIV infection undoubtedly constitutes). I'm sure, most people understand this, and most people (most infected people, too) would not knowingly subject a loved one to serious risk of bodily harm, unless there were strong reasons for doing so. Note that I am not saying these strong reasons make their conduct anymore ethically acceptable, but they might make it understandable. I think, with the quasi-religious stigma that progressive activists as well as religious fundamentalists have created quite successfully around HIV/AIDS, it's quite demanding, possibly even too demanding of people who are infected or at risk of infections to tell their sexual partner(s). May be we'd just protect ourselves, but then, it seems most (far too many, if that makes you feel better than the word 'most') of us are not very good at that either. Anybody with a magic bullet please?!

What amuses me a bit is the continuation of a quasi-enlightenment based response to the problem at hand: The Washington Post duly editorializes, 'The fight against AIDS demands not only vigilance but also continuous education. An informed populace is the best defense against this ferocious epidemic.' This belief that education is the key fascinates me, as we have overwhelming evidence that our response to HIV risk (in the context of sexual behavior) isn't rational to begin with. We know it not only for the USA but for plenty of other countries. Just one example from ... of all places, Angola, reported by the kaiser family foundation: 'According to research by ANASO, 70% of youths in the country do not use condoms, despite their awareness of HIV. The network plans to partner with the Ministry of Education and communities throughout the country to mobilize and educate 340,000 young people through 2010.' So, if 70% of sexually active youngsters in the country don't use condoms despite having relevant knowledge of HIV, and access to rubber, what makes people stick with the idea that it's about education? Beats me. Anyone with a magic bullet on this, email me (the dinner is on me :): udo.schuklenk@gmail.com . Hey, I know about A and B already, so don't bore me with your religious drivel on this, if that is what you think is worth mentioning. Doesn't work either, just check out the unfolding AIDS disaster in the religious right's posterboy on this, Uganda.

Bob Madhat and 'God'

The Crown of Creation at work - another one of those days

It's been another successful day in the life of the Crown of Creation. To refresh your memory ... then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." As you might recall, God is omniscient, omnipotent and God happens to be 'good'. Well, no big surprise then, that on the sixth day of genesis God had a look around and "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good". Very good indeed it was!

Well, let's see how our perfect Creator's work has panned out. Hey, why not check simply today's almost certainly glorious news to see how wonderful God's good creation is doing?

USA: Ethnic minority women die in Los Angeles and New York hospitals, respectively, because nobody attends to them in her dying moments. People see one of them lying on the floor and walk carefully around her.
PHILIPPINES: A gay guy cuts off his lover's penis because he suspects his lover might have slept - oh horror - with a woman.
GERMANY: A bunch of guys kidnap women and keep them as sex slaves in their flat, renting them out as prostitutes, make them sleep in dog cages and walk them around on a leash in the flat.
ISRAEL: A bulldozer driver rampages in Jerusalem and kills a whole bunch of people.

Yo God, thanks for nothing. If that's the best you can do, seeing your omnipotence, omniscience and 'good'ness, I kinda wonder whether you really exist, or, if you exist, whether you really are omnipotent, omniscient, indeed, I can't help wondering whether you're a good guy. But hey, that's just me.

Where there is organised Christianity there is censorship

Heinz, ye, the producer of red and white health risks designed to be added to your fries, has recently produced a cute lil ad to promote the sales of its white blubber. Well, to be honest, it's probably a good thing that the sale of its mayo cannot be promoted as much as the company had planned to, given the health risks involved in this fatty product. However, the reasons for why the lil ad never saw the light of the day had nothing to do with our health, but everything to do with organised Christianity exercising its God given right to determine on our behalf what we may or may not see. It threatened Heinz with a boycott campaign because middle-aged guys were kissing in the video. Look at the video yourself. It's about the most obviously non-sexual, non-obscene thing you will have seen in your whole life. So, the issue really was that there were two men kissing, and according to God's earthly reps that just isn't on. Sadly Heinz caved in to the God squad's black (or shall I say, Christ-) mailing. So, in my own little subversive way, without further ado, here's a link to the ad. Check it out! It's lighthearted fun. Even your kids will enjoy it.

AU - an acronym for FARCE

The AU meets currently in Sharm-el-Sheikh. Competent mostly at doing nothing, this remarkable organisation succeeds once again in doing nothing. While, based on its own statutes it should have expelled Robert Gabrielle Mugabe from its ranks and from his big leather chair, because he wasn't democratically elected, he has been welcomed. He was also asked to start negotiations with the elected President of Zimbabwe, Mr Morgan Tsvangirai. Sadly Bob Madhat has no interest in doing so, and that's the end. The end. Prospective dictators of the world, learn your lesson: you WILL get away with it, unless you're planning on kidnapping an oilrich country. If you do (see Kuwait and Iraq), the world suddenly is concerned about the country in question. So pick a reasonably poor place without major natural resources, and - really - you can do what you want.

Hey, while I'm at it, the AU is, of course, sponsored by Western taxpayers, courtesy of their governments. Why not stop sponsoring expensive luxury hotel stays for those comedians (pardon me, African leaders) altogether.

Thousands and a million spectators at Toronto Gay Pride

Hey, I had a great weekend! I went to join in the fun that's Toronto's gay pride party (and march) this last weekend. Great stuff, lots of stages with non-stop events, and security asking for my ID to check my age (trust me, when you are about to turn mid-40s you do appreciate that someone is kind enough to check whether you've reached maturity).

Well, the march was ... long, very long, something like 4 hours (my mid-40s feet started hurting eventually), and ... ummm ... somewhat boring. Compared to the in-your-face kinkiness that Sydney and Berlin tend to offer to the (very much suspecting) public, this was a sedate affair, all in all. The occasional naked marcher popped up, even some leather folks, as well as a naked pre-op transsexual. And that was that. In any case, it's been a great great show that these volunteers put on. I am truly grateful for the time people put in in order to make this a memorable gay pride. This being the mainstream event that it is, even my bank had its own little float, as had other banks, radio and TV stations, the armed forces, firefighters, huge contingents of the Liberal, NDP and Green parties (kindly the Conservatives decided not to show up - this should conserve its Western prairies votes quite nicely - well done Mr Harper!), as well as the police, nurses and the list goes on and on and on. Mind you, even the hotel where I was staying, the downtown Hilton had its own contingent in the march. Good on them! There were even gay Christians like Catholics, Anglicans and assorted other Christian sects (they should really have another look at their God's bible, my hunch is that they just might have missed something there...)

The guy leading the march was a Jamaican gay activist (probably looking for asylum in Canada, seeing how militantly homophobic that creepy little island state is). No doubt this has been a very smart choice as it keeps reminding people how terrible the situation for gay people in even reasonably close-by places is. You'd find in the local Toronto papers suggestions that Canadian tourists should boycott Caribbean tourist destinations that do not protect the human rights of their gay citizens. Great idea!

Of course, gay events and alcohol go well together, so the main sponsor of much of this seems to have been the producer of a drink called xyz ice or something. No idea what it is, but whoever they were, they certainly splashed out, trying to persuade the partying crowd to buy their 7$ a pop drink. No doubt there were hidden stickers saying 'drink responsibly'. And you know what, people even party responsibly in Canada. I saw very very few people who were seriously over their limit. All in all, it's been a family friendly event (and I don't necessarily mean gay families, but any kinds of families). Nice one!

Oh ye, about the heading of this blog entry, check out this link... CTV, the media sponsor of this year's pride kinda couldn't decide how many people lined the streets to cheer on the marchers. The title says 'thousands of spectators', in the articles it says 'a million spectators'. I do accept that many thousands eventually translate into a million (and potentially more than that), but it's odd nonetheless.

On that note, glad I went. I even bumped into a colleague from Toronto Uni. Small world.

South Africa's seemingly unstoppable march into oblivion

Na, I'm not going to rave again about Pres Thabo-the-man (Bob Madhat's significant other) or health prevention minister Whiskey-Manto-new-liver-for-me-ASAP, but here's a tell-tale sign as to how rapidly South Africa's heading south: Amazon has stopped delivering to the country, because theft of parcels has become so rampant that it's bad business to do business any longer with South Africans.

Thank you Paddy Ashdown!

At long last, someone is speaking sense in the 'international community'. While the slaughter in Zimbabwe continues unabated, and the delusional, syphilitic and somewhat deranged dictator running the show there declares that he can only be removed from office by God, Africans are once again paying the price for the useless leaders they elected to high office. The one country that could long have made a difference in Zim, South Africa, has been governed by Zanu-PF's (oops, the ANC's) Thabo Mbeki. Remember: Thabo-the-man hasn't seen anyone yet die on AIDS in the country that he has misgoverned for the last 8-10 years or so, and (while holding hands with Bob Madhat Gabrielle Mugabe) he declared that he doesn't think there's a major problem in Zimbabwe. So, the millions of illegal Zim refugees in South Africa are not really an indication that Bob Madhat Gabrielle Mugabe stuffed it up. Not at all, according to Thabo and his lover Robert Madhat Gabrielle Mugabe. That much is clear. Reassuringly the leadership void that is Thabo Mbeki has been filled by many African leaders who have condemned the rapidly escalating genocide in Zimbabwe.

Comes Paddy Ashdown. He suggests in today's TIMES that may be the time has come for a military intervention in Zimbabwe, to stop the thugs governing the country from destroying what's left of it, and to stop them from killing more brave Zimbabweans. Sadly, however, Zimbabwe has no oil to speak of, hence this almost certainly is not going to happen any time soon. All we've got is black-on-black violence, and as anyone knows, that doesn't really count. If there is no other reason than to preserve their lives, we can almost be certain that no truly international intervention will be forthcoming. To be fair, SADC or the AU could send their own troops, but they're probably equally unwilling to interfere with this Zim home-made problem.

Airlines taking us for a ride - oops, flight!

You know, like most people who have to fly for work related reasons - I hate air travel sufficiently to not fly in order to get to a vacation destination - I have got used to the ongoing offensively lousy customer disservices that outfits like Air Canada inflict upon the traveling public. So I'm used to flights getting canceled for no good reason other than that it was an 'act of God' (hello, can't us humanists at least get a slightly more intelligible explanation?), or that on long-distance flights they offer a dry roll wrapped around one slice of cucumber in lieu of a vegetarian breakfast, stuff like that. Yes, I got to be honest: the more of them go bankrupt the better off both the environment and the remaining traveling public will be.

Here's one gripe I have, however, and I hope regulators will step in soon to stop their shenanigans in that regard. Melbourne's THE AGE newspaper reports today that JAL is planning to levy a 1000 A$ fuel surcharge on flights from Down Under to Europe. Truth be told, I don't care what they charge. My gripe is that in order to compare like for like, airlines should be forced to quote one price for the trip from A to B and that's that. What is all this gimmickry including fuel surcharges, taxes, looking at planes twice, toilet fees, utilisation of seats etc? It's ridiculous. Of course, if you want to fly an airplane from A to B you need - hint - fuel. So, buy it and include it in your price, but spare me the ridiculous surcharges. If you're too incompetent to budget properly, don't make that my problem, just get out of business! I mean, they also have other cost factors, like running their planes, salaries, etc etc. Surely there is nothing in principle different between these costa and fuel costs or 'taxes', hence all of that should be included in one final price, and that is what the airlines should be forced by regulators to quote.

Otherwise it's a bit like a baker charging me a gas surcharge on the baked cake she's selling me, or a doctor adding a heating surcharge for the time that I spent in her heated waiting room. It's plain bizarre. Nearly as bizarre as Northamerican mobile phone companies charging you 'long-distance' fees for calls on the continent. Like, hello, don't you people understand the concept of satellite based communications. There is no such a thing as a long-distance call in any meaningful way on a mobile phone, yet these arbitrary charges are SOP of mobile phone operators in Canada. Oh well, getting off my soap box for this weekend. Enjoy yours. And remember, use the bicycle if you can.

Bob Madhat Gabrielle Mugabe

Nuff said

5* Hotels and the Pharmaceutical Industry

You will probably know that pharmaceutical companies (despite quadrillions of ethics codes of conduct that were usually produced by bioethics consultants of sorts) try hard to persuade doctors to prescribe their medicines as opposed to equally effective cheaper products. So they go about this by means of giving doctors plastic pens, inviting them to fanciful dinners, and much much more. Anyway, one way of keeping selected medics on their side has been to invite them to 'educational' events, usually in a nice city like Paris, Sydney or Berlin. All expenses on those junket trips are naturally paid for by industry.

Well, there has been a bit of an outcry over this, seeing that many people are unable to afford the medicines their obliging doctors prescribe them, private health insurance fees have gone thru the roof, and public health care systems resort to ever more draconian resource allocation measures to deal with the rising prices. So, unsurprisingly perhaps, it has been suggested that luxury hotel accommodation like 5* outfits for such junket trips are kinda unacceptable. Pharmaceutical companies have, hence, become reluctant to book such venues in recent years. Clever hoteliers in Berlin have found a way to deal with this (and I am not joking!). 5* hotels like the Hilton, Steigenberger, Intercontinental, Swissotel, and the Esplanade are giving one of their stars back to keep the pharmaceutical industry bookings rolling in. The service levels remain the same, of course, and so do the prices. It's a scheme designed to permit freeloaders and their service providers to continue feeling comfy again without having to worry about how it will look like in the public eye.

Gay Marriage? - Whatever ...

I don't care much about the gay marriage activism, so the drama playing out in California kinda bores me to death. It's essentially a conservative agenda as most feminists have long realized. I also don't care much about the internal US politics on that issue as the country is stuffed so substantially that a small 'victory' on a by and large unimportant civil rights issue should not divert attention from how bad things really are over there.

Just to be clear, gay people as much as anyone else are perfectly entitled to see their relationships legally recognized (ie visitation rights in hospitals, retirement planning, access to partner's medical plans and so on and so forth). This, however, doesn't seem to be the activists' issue as they have claimed in many countries that civil partnerships that guarantee to same-sex couples the same legal rights and protections as to married couples (except the word 'marriage' won't be used to described those relationships) are insufficient and hugely discriminatory.

Well, here's my main problem with this: In my little universe, marriage as an institution has been an overwhelming failure. Roughly every second marriage today ends up in the divorce courts, and there is an even larger number of people who would get divorced but stick together in unhappy marriages due to religious or other cultural pressures. - And that's just for straight folks. Now, explain to me, why do gay folks clamor so hard for the 'right' of access to the same flawed institution? We do not seem - well, most of us anyway - to be hardwired to sustain marriages as the life-time type institutions that they're supposed to be.

To my mind, the state should not be in the business of sanctioning marriages. Leave it to religious organizations as a special membership benefit. So, queer churches such as the MCC - ignoring anything the bible ever said about homosexuality - can then offer to their gay flock marriages at a discount.

Beats me though, why there is this hysteria about marriage...

Ouch, the religious 'conscience' is at it again

In that never-ending saga of special rights for religious folks, here's the latest installment. The Washington Post reported yesterday that there is a growing number of pharmacies refusing to stock condoms, birth control pills, the morning-after pill and the like. 'Pro-life' pharmacies as they're misleadingly called have decided to pass moral judgment about patients' needs and have decided to meet only some patients' needs but not others.

Whatever medical needs they choose to meet is entirely based on their arbitrary conscience instead of something usually called professionalism. So, here we have people whose job it is to dispense prescription drugs (like the pill), and who have been given a monopoly by the state for the provision of prescription drugs. Pops God in and professional conduct goes out of the window. They decide to provide only some medicines but not others.

Let me do a quick reality check here: Reportedly the Christian God isn't too keen on guys having sex with each other either. As it happens, sometimes while guys have sex with each other, condoms break and a quick visit to the pharmacy becomes necessary in order to order to access HIV post-exposure prophylaxis (the kinda cool acronym is PEP). Well, are the conscience pharmacies going to provide such medicines? How will their conscience based service provision lottery pan out on this one? Or, imagine a gay guy who's developed AIDS and needs to purchase AIDS drugs, will he get them or will the cross wielding pharmacists tell him to take a hike? What about pharmacists who belong to a white supremacist (aka aryan) church? Are they no longer obliged to serve minority ethnic folks because their good conscience tells them not to? What if the conscience pharmacy is the only one by a long stretch and people have no choice other than to go there, is it really acceptable for them to abuse their monopoly in such a manner as to force their bizarre views of the world on their clients?

The central issue here is that professional conduct, particularly from providers with a state guaranteed monopoly, can't reasonably be held hostage to arbitrary individual decisions, be they grounded in conscience or anything else. We have every right as a society to expect uniform services from pharmacists across the country and we have every right to refuse to accept an on-going opt-out lottery by people who hold strong views on some kinds of patients or others. If they do not wish to provide comprehensive health services their license should be revoked. End of story.

Oh well, conscience bizarristan in action - as ever in the USA near you.

Yay! Firefox 3 is on the go

Hey folks, Firefox 3 is ready for free download. If you don't have Firefox yet or you didn't know that Firefox 3 is on the go, check it out here. They're trying to set a new worldrecord for browser downloads, so check out the site and register with em.

Low IQ predictive of religious beliefs

Here's a cool piece of research to be published in the journal INTELLIGENCE. Richard Lynn, John Harvey and Helmuth Nyborg from universities in the UK and Denmark have tried to investigate whether there is a negative relationship between IQ (measured in psychometric terms) and religious belief. They cite existing evidence 'pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief (coming) from four sources. These are (1) negative correlations between intelligence and religious belief; 2) lower percentages holding religious beliefs among intelligence elites compared with the general population; 3) a decline of religious belief with age among children and adolescents as their cognitive abilities increase; 4) a decline in religious belief during the course of the 20th century as the intelligence of the populations has increased.' There has been plenty of empirical research to establish that case from within nations, eg a representative study in the Netherlands found that non-believers scored in the average a statistically significantly higher IQ than the God squad.

Anyway, Lynn, Harvey and Nyborg decided to investigate the relationship between average IQ and religious belief between nations. They then compared the average IQs of most of the world's nations against the percentage of believers in those nations. Their finding is that 'the negative correlation between IQ and religious belief that has been found in numerous studies within nations is also present between nations.' Explaining the surprisingly high percentage of religious believers in the USA, they observe that 'religious belief has a significant heritability of around 0.4-0.5, so it could be that a number of religious emigrants from Europe had the genetic predisposition for religious belief and this has been transmitted to much of the present population.'

No surprise then that nations with an average IQ that's not overly high tend to be found among those countries with a particularly low percentage of non-believers. Check out the country-by-country statistics presented in the paper. Kinda fun reading if you're suitably prejudiced:).

Disclaimer: I am aware of the academic work highly critical of the concept(s) of IQ. Enjoyed the paper anyway. Here's the doi:10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.004

Thanks to my good friend Michael Ristow (now a medical prof in Germany, back in our student days a fellow leftwing activist) who kindly passed this reference on to me!

Why You and I Should be Vegetarians

Hey, going on for awhile longer with my Greenie theme (I'm even wearing those aptly named 'lesbian sandals' aka Birkenstock sandals currently), here's a green reason for why you and I should be vegetarians. It's all really very simple actually, and it doesn't take a lot of philosophical acrobatics to explain the matter. The truth of the matter is that very many people are going hungry today, and the reason for this is directly linked to our unreasonable demands on beef, chicken etc production.

Check this out, culled from wikipedia - without much further checking, so don't take my word for it and check the claims if you doubt their veracity -: 'the data we had indicated that a beef animal consumed 100 kg of hay and 4 kg of grain per 1 kg of beef produced. Using the basic rule that it takes about 1,000 liters of water to produce 1 kg of hay and grain, thus about 100,000 liters were required to produce the 1 kg of beef.' You can do the same exercise for energy consumption. The bottom line is that the production of beef - even if there were no other reasons against the breeding and killing of animals for food products - is so utterly wasteful and detrimental to our survival interests as a species, it is remarkable that we continue living as we do, and pretending that it's ok. We got away with this wastefulness for a long time, simply because most folks in Africa, Asia and Latin America just couldn't afford to eat the amounts of beef and chicken that the average Northamerican and the average European consumed. Thanks to their growing economies, however, many people have become much better off there. Beef is seen in many of the rapidly developing nations on our little planet as a sign of wealth, so the result is that many more people than ever eat ever more beef. It's highly unlikely that our environment can sustain that sort of thing. So, if you care about future generations of people like you, try to be as vegetarian as you can possibly be.

And, if this doesn't persuade you, here is another good reason for why we shouldn't eat animals anyway, regardless of the environmental impact issue.

Ooops, our oil reserves are finite - what a surprise

Quite funny, the Green movement has told us (well, at the time I was a very active part of it) some 20 years ago that we're running out of oil, and that - among other things - we need to reconsider our predominant modes of transport (a 1 ton vehicle to transport a 70kg body to the supermarket around the corner; academics like myself flying frequently to a far-flung corner of the world to give a 15-20 min presentation that could have been presented just as well by audio-videolink - but hey, what else do we have to feel good about ourselves :-).

It goes without saying we Greenies were variously called tree-huggers, stupid, romantic, naive or a combination of these things. Well, we were right, of course, our resources on this planet are very much finite (hence the idea that we need continuing economic growth to be happy is so remarkably and so obviously silly, yet it drives everything that we do).

So, fast forward to mid 2008. The oil price has reached breathtaking heights, and while we should be mostly concerned about the impact this will have on the affordability of food products, if you watch TV (presumably on your giant flat screen TV, which happens to have replaced ovens in many homes because they're emanating so much heat) you will be forgiven for thinking that the oil price issue is really about airline survival and the Hummer (the ridiculous GM car still produced for the Homer Simpson types of the real world - reportedly men with really really small penises). There is some good news, though, airlines shut down plenty of planes; here is hoping that Air Canada might fall by the wayside altogether, but things are not looking promising because the airline has long since begun to treat its customers particularly badly, so it might survive longer than some of its better behaved competitors.

There's also some huha about GM shutting down car factories in various countries. The truth is, of course, that this is a small reason for celebrations as it will bring us closer to keeping much-needed energy reserves for longer. Of course, for some bizarre reason, those in power (let's call them our 'representatives') do not seem to bother about putting efficient public transport systems in place. I live currently a lot of the time in Kingston, a medium-sized city in Ontario. The public transport system does arguably not even deserve the name system. The bus stops don't display information as to the route of the buses that happen to stop there on the odd occasion, indeed, even information about when buses can be expected to stop there (it's called a timetable in Europe) is not on display. Surely it can't surprise then that people take their giant American car out for a ride to the supermarket. So, decades after we knew we couldn't go on like we did, we chose collectively to stick our head in the sand and voted for GM's Hummer, Chrysler's 300C (incidentally a car driven by Barack Obama the supposedly so clever US Senator trying to become the next President of the USA), and my all-time favourite car, the Maserati Sedan.

Ok, I'm getting off my soap box now. Guess all I'm saying is, ask yourself more often what the impact of your action on the environment and future generations is. If your action is incompatible with a high-quality environment and existing future generations of people, don't do it unless you really have no choice (slight inconvenience isn't the same as saying that you really have no choice).

Conflict of interest declaration: I can't drive, so decent public transport would make a big difference to my life.

AIDS vaccine research - Time to call it a day?

AIDS prevention research has hit a major road block. More than 150 recent prevention trials including vaccine and microbicide candidates failed to protect trial participants against HIV infection. It is inevitable that the question is asked: Is there ever a point in time where we should concede defeat and abandon any further HIV vaccine and HIV microbicide trials?

With the death toll standing at 25 million lives lost prematurely to AIDS, and 33 million people worldwide currently living with HIV, the unpleasant truth is we have no choice other than to press ahead with further trials. I am not a great fan of Winston Churchill, but his famous remark, ‘Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never’ seems to be the only appropriate response to the vaccine/microbicide trial question in the age of AIDS.

AIDS drugs have become more sophisticated, and no one knows for sure how long people will be able to cope with the side effects of such powerful agents. Truth be told, while new drugs are being developed continuously, we are barely ahead of the ever-mutating virus. Are we ahead at all, or are we falling further behind? For every one person bring treated in the developing world, roughly five new people become infected. It is far from clear that we can win the numbers game.

Even though significant inroads have been made, it remains that the vast majority of people in developing countries who could clinically benefit from AIDS drugs have no access to the life preserving medications that continue to be brought to the market.

While AIDS vaccine trials continue unabated, so do the equally unsuccessful microbicide trials. Microbicide trials are described by some as the politically correct brother of the better funded AIDS vaccine trials. Their scientific rationale seems as shaky, if not shakier than those of vaccine candidates, yet they continue because they are seen as the last best hope for women in developing countries to protect themselves against infection. The trouble is that so far all these trials have achieved so far is an increase in the number of women who have become more susceptible to an HIV infection as a result of their trial participation.

Proponents of the defeatist stance, including Homayoon Khanlou and Michael Weinstein of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the largest provider of HIV/AIDS medical care in the USA, argue that instead of continuing to squander hundreds of millions of dollars on a futile quest for an HIV vaccine, the focus should shift to spending on the prevention, testing and treatment of AIDS.

But we will only ever know after a trial whether or not it has been futile. At this point in time there is no real reason to assume such trials will necessarily fail. What we should be focusing on instead are other ethical concerns such as the provision of care to people who seroconvert during trials, or people who become more susceptible to an infection due to their trial participation. We have to ensure that no trial participant is left without adequate clinical care at the very minimum. The talk about pulling the plug on HIV vaccine and microbicide trials needs to end sooner rather than later.

Universities too lenient with plagiarising students

A remarkable piece of research was reported by the BBC. The target of the investigation were some 80 plus UK universities. It seems as if of 9200 students caught plagiarising only 143 students were expelled. That's possibly fair enough, because without further information about the severity of the cheating it's difficult to ascertain whether expelling the students would have been more appropriate in the majority of cases found. Still, it is hugely worrisome that the reason given for why penalties have not been harsher is that academics felt they would likely not be backed up by their institution and/or worries that high-powered student lawyers would destroy the case in court. Check out the original reporting and read the commnens made by university teachers as well as cheating students. It's frightening!

Enhancing my grey cells

There's no doubt among those 'in the know' that in the foreseeable future we will be able to access new drugs that will permit us to boost our brain functions. Drugs designed to halt or prevent the deterioration of Alzheimer's patients will likely equally be able to enhance the memory of people with brains like mine. My friends and colleagues know all too well that my memory has always been absolutely atrocious, and it is remarkably selective, too. I manage to remember most stuff to do with my work (most, but by no means all important things), yet on the odd occasion I forgot even my own birthday, not to talk about my long-suffering parents' birthdays. In fact, my dear sister has a habit of sending me little reminders that my Mom's or my Dad's birthday are about to come up. Yes, I know, I could, of course, simply set up a reminder in my on-line diary.

But, wouldn't it be nice, if I could simply pop a pill and manage to boost my memory to the point where my sister wouldn't have to remind me, and I wouldn't have to put every little appointment into my diary (incl a detailed description about what it's for etc). Such a drug would clearly enhance my cognitive functions. Now, it's a short step from there, of course, to boosting our regular brain function, too. There is no in principle reason, it seems, why the brain functions of people with lower intelligence could not also be improved over time. Other such drugs might permit people with bad memories (say a traumatic accident) to eliminate such memories altogether.

Now, the question is, of course, whether we should permit people who experience mental states not defined as an illness access to such drugs. Is it acceptable for someone who hasn't Alzheimer's to be given access to a drug that enhances her memory? I can't see why that should not be the case to be honest, because at the end of the day our definition of any given illness fundamentally look toward improving the human condition of someone who is suffering from that condition. Bad memory, traumatic experiences and lower intelligence, to name just a few, all contribute - all other things being equal - to a lower quality of life of those affected by them. There is no good reason to declare them 'not ill' and prevent them from access to such drugs. It is as simple as that, to my mind.