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.