Technical problems at the new blog resolved

Finally!
Even though I normally try not to blog from work, I have to take a moment while I'm eating lunch to announce this: Previous technical problems with the new blog that prevented my posts and your comments from showing up on this blog have now been resolved.

Orac is back online.

Everything appears to be working as it should, and you should be able to comment over there again.

Normal blogging will resume tomorrow, and I will cease posting to this Blogspot blog indefinitely. It will continue to serve as an archive site for the first incarnation of Respectful Insolence and a backup place to post in case of disaster over at ScienceBlogs. If I ever experience problems with the new blog again, this is where announcements will appear to inform you.

For a different take on the David Irving verdict...

Go here. The Photoshopped picture and caption are priceless.

Shooting free speech in the foot: David Irving sentenced to three years in jail for denying the Holocaust

[NOTE: My technical problems at the new blog continue. I'm assured the techies are working on fixing them, but, although my posts show up in the feed, they do not show up on my blog. In essence, I cannot post, and comments, although saved, do not show up. Until the techies get this problem fixed, I'm posting here at the old blog.]

Well, that was fast.

The trial took less than a day. David Irving, as expected, pleaded guilty. As expected, he was found guilty of Holocaust denial. What was not expected was the severity of the sentence:

VIENNA, Feb. 20 (AP) — The British historian David Irving on Monday pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison. He conceded that he was wrong when he said there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.

Mr. Irving, handcuffed and wearing a navy blue suit, arrived in court carrying a copy of one of his books, "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.

"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he told the court before his sentencing, at which he faced up to 10 years in prison.

"In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis," testified Mr. Irving, who has written nearly 30 books.

He also expressed sorrow "for all the innocent people who died during the Second World War."

Mr. Irving's lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, immediately announced that he would appeal the sentence.

"I consider the verdict a little too stringent," he said. "I would say it's a bit of a message trial."

Mr. Irving appeared shocked as the sentence was read. Moments later, an elderly man who identified himself as a family friend called out, "Stay strong, David! Stay strong!" The man was escorted from the courtroom.

I have to say, I was shocked myself when I read of it. Three years in prison for nothing more than offensive speech? Is this what we've come to?

I understand all the arguments that Holocaust denial has a different resonance in Germany and Austria than it does in the U.S. I understand that the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust leads to a particular sensitivity in these countries that we don't share, that Holocaust denial is feared as a vehicle for the resurgence of Nazi-ism and fascism. I can even understand how, in the early postwar period, such laws may have been essential to protect the their fledgling democracies. But there comes a time to take the training wheels off. It's been over 60 years since the end of World War II, well over two full generations. How much longer do they need these laws? Will they proscribe free speech in this way forever?

The bottom line is that, not only are laws against Holocaust denial an offense against free speech, but they don't work. They suppress nothing. David Irving got more publicity in Austria than he had gotten in six years. Before, he was fading into well-deserved obscurity. Now he's a martyr for the far right. His writings and those of many other Holocaust deniers are easily accessible on the web, yes, even in Austria. Suppressing it only confirms the claims of the Holocaust deniers that the government is "afraid" of their message.

For an example of how properly to deal with Holocaust deniers, one has only to look to Northwestern University in Evanston. There, one of the granddaddies of Holocaust denial in the U.S., Arthur R. Butz, is a tenured Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern who in 1976 wrote a book called The Hoax of the 20th Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Since then, he has used his tenured position to give stature to his denial, all the while being very careful not to give the administration of Northwestern a reason (such as preaching Holocaust denial in his engineering class) to try to get rid of him. Not much had been heard from ol' Butzy recently, until he started defending the President of Iran for his Holocaust denial, going so far, after repeating a bunch of canards about the long-debunked Leuchter Report, to say in an editorial in the student newspaper:

That brings us to President Ahmadinejad of Iran. For many years I ignored revisionism coming from Islamic countries, because I found it inept. With Ahmadinejad, I found something else; his statements were formidable in their perspicacity. My original statement on him has to be read to make the specifics clear. He understands the intellectual terror in the West. However, the best surprise came after I wrote my endorsement. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a routine pompous suggestion to Ahmadinejad: Visit the camps and see for yourself. Ahmadinejad replied: Good idea, I’ll bring a scientific team. He knows about the forensic issues too.

Given how inept Butz's denial is, one has to wonder how truly poorly argued the Holocaust denial coming out of the Middle East must be for even Butz to turn his nose up at it. But I digress. Deborah Lipstadt responded with a strong article slapping down Butz and pointing out that the editors of the student newspaper had been so open minded that their brains fell out.

Also appropriate is a reaction by the very students of Northwestern called the Never Again campaign:

The Never Again Campaign is an organization started by students at Northwestern University in February of 2006. The campaign aims to increase Holocaust education, promote global tolerance, and stop genocides that are occurring today around the world.

The Never Again Campaign will bring speakers, host workshops, and offer resources to spread awareness about these issues on the Northwestern campus. Similarly, we hope to convince other universities to adopt our goals.

Recently, Northwestern engineering Professor, Arthur Butz, denied the Holocaust and congratulated the President of Iran on becoming the first modern head of state to deny the Holocaust. In response, students and faculty have come together to express their outrage and disappointment that a Northwestern professor made such an offensive and historically inaccurate declaration.

Their goal? To get Northwestern, as a private institution, to stop letting Butz use its public website to spread his lies, because doing so associates the name of the University with his denial, and to take actions to repudiate his Holocaust denial and to marginalize him, given the black eye he's given the institution.

As I said yesterday, freedom of speech is easy to value and honor when the speech isn't offensive. It becomes much more difficult to do when it is something as despicable and hateful as Holocaust denial. Indeed, defending free speech often means defending scum like Irving and Butz. However, it is not necessary to throw Butz, or any other Holocaust denier in jail to combat their lies. The way to combat his lies, or those of David Irving, or any other Holocaust denier is for opposing voices to make their displeasure known and to shine the light of truth on their lies.

David Irving on trial

[NOTE: This is being posted here because my new blog is currently having technical difficulties that prevent my posting on it. Once the technical problems have been fixed (hopefully tomorrow), I will repost this over there. I wondered if this blog would have any further use, and unfortunately I found out sooner than I expected that it would.]


Well, today's the day. After all the waiting, it's finally here.

David Irving is going to stand trial for Holocaust denial in Austria today.

Those of you who have read my old blog a while know what a despicable human being I consider David Irving to be. He's clearly an anti-Semite, most famously having said that "more women died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz" and being known for repeating anti-Semitic doggerel. He's spent decades in essence falsifying history, denying that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, that the the Nazis had a plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry. And, his pretentions otherwise notwithstanding, he is no champion of free speech. Indeed, when the historian Deborah Lipstadt referred to him as a Holocaust denier in a book, he waited until her book was released in Britain, which has the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in Europe or the U.S., and then sued her there in 2000.

He lost and was humiliated. The final judgment found that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier.

I do have to admit to feeling a fair amount of schadenfreude when Irving was arrested in Austria last November. Irving knew damned well that there was a warrant for his arrest for denying the Holocaust in a speech he gave in 1989. He even worried about it on his own website and took precautions before he left, such as leaving behind 60 signed blank checks and bringing eight shirts, even though he was only supposed to be in Austria for two days. He knew what he was doing and what risk he was taking.

Still, as an advocate of free speech, I found (and still find) the entire affair very troubling. Yes, Irving's views are odious. Yes, he has spent decades promoting Holocaust denial. Yes, in recent years he has associated with some really scary people on the far right. Yes, in the three speeches he gave in Austria, he told an audience in Leoben that Kristallnacht was carried out by "unknowns" dressed up as members of the SA; that Anne Frank could not have written her diary herself because the Biro wasn't invented until 1949; and that Hitler never gave an order to exterminate the Jews. He cited research by the discredited Fred Leuchter claiming that the Auschwitz gas chambers couldn't have been used to gas Jews because he couldn't find cyanide residues in the bricks. Yes, he asserted that "Auschwitz is a legend, just like the Turin Shroud" and that "the existence of witnesses proves that there was no mass extermination," among numerous other statements clearly denying the Holocaust.

Even so.

Upholding freedom of speech is not difficult in cases of views that are mainstream or that don't offend. Upholding freedom of speech is difficult in case like David Irving. The bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, is that Irving should not be in prison. Imprisoning him achieves nothing other than raising his stature and letting him plausibly don the mantle of free speech martyr. All it does is lead him to make such ludicrious "recantations" that he now believes there were gas chambers at Auschwitz:

His conversion, according to Irving, came in 1992 after his discovery of two documents - a discovery he kept to himself until recently. One was a radio message sent to Adolf Eichmann in 1943, reporting that during the previous 12 months more than a million people had died in Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec concentration camps.

Odd that he never mentioned this before, even though he supposedly discovered it 13 years ago and especially since, as recently as 2005, he was still denying that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. No one can see his sudden "conversion" as anything other than a transparent attempt to obtain leniency. If he is imprisoned for a harsh sentence (and the penalty for Holocaust denial in Austria can be as long as 20 years), he becomes a martyr. If he is released with time served, he will likely return to Britain and renounce his recantation. By arresting him and vowing to try him, Austria has placed itself in a no-win situation.

Of course, not all see it this way. Indeed, in The New Statesman was published an impassioned defense of jailing Irving and keeping him there, written by Roger Boyes. Too bad it's full of logical fallacies and poor reasoning typical of the arguments for suppressing free speech:

Even so, a courtroom is as close as most Holocaust deniers come to heaven. A captive audience, those chilly metallic blondes from CNN, the right to rant. Judging by his website, Irving is relishing his moment in the spotlight: even a lost court case represents a triumph of publicity for his malign deceptions on Hitler and his crimes. Hitler used his stint in jail to write Mein Kampf; for Irving, too, imprisonment is a kind of state-financed sabbatical.

Advocates of the absolute right to free speech say that Irving's obvious enthusiasm for courtroom confrontation is a powerful argument for letting him go. Take away the courtroom and you take away his theatrical props. Ignore him, and the netherworld of Irving and the unsavoury club of Holocaust deniers withers away, killed by our oppressive tolerance. He may be - no, he is - hopelessly and deliberately wrong but he has the right to proclaim his crazy views, just as we have the right to plug our ears with cotton wool.

Geez, talk about the fallacy of the excluded middle (a.k.a. the false dilemma)! We either have to jail Irving or ignore him? Are there no other options, such as, for example, speaking out against his lies and countering his lies and distortions with facts? And so what if Irving is "relishing the spotlight"? There wouldn't be any spotlight for Irving to relish if Austria hadn't arrested Irving in the first place. There wouldn't be a media circus with 50 television crews and the need for riot police to prevent protests by neo-Nazis.

The rest of the piece appears to consist of an argument that we must respect the "word" (whatever that means) and that the interests of Irving and other Holocaust deniers are are "merging with those of the anti-Semitic ideologists of Arab nationalism and Iranian theocratic rule." Boyes expresses concern that, "if Irving walks free from the Wien-Josefstadt Prison next week he will soon be packing his suitcase for the Holocaust conference in Tehran."

So what if Irving heads for Iran? That's not an argument to put him in jail for his speech, nor is it an argument to revoke the passport of the vile neo-Nazi Horst Mahler to prevent him from traveling to Iran, something Boyes refers to as "wise." The anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial of the Arab nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist regimes of the Middle East would still exist and be just as virulent without David Irving and his fellow deniers. It's not as though Irving would gain respectability by going to Iran's conference to question the authenticity of the Holocaust or that he in his disgrace after the Lipstadt trial could lend respectability to this farce of a conference.

Nonetheless Boyes concludes:

We are not making Irving into a martyr by jailing him. We (or the Austrians on our behalf) are making the world a little bit safer - and defining the limits of tolerance.

I propose a counterexample. I'd ask Boyes a question, given that he points out that the Irving case should reveal the "limits of tolerance." Who gets to decide what the "limits of tolerance" are for free speech? Let's take an example from the good old U.S.A.: the rabid far right winger Ann Coulter. She provides red meat rhetoric for extremists. Indeed, she uses eliminationist rhetoric, as David Neiwert (of Orcinus) has pointed out time and time again. She made an infamous statement after 9/11 in which she said about Muslim countries that we should "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity," not worrying about how many civilians we kill in the process. She most recently gave a major speech where she referred to Muslims as "ragheads" who need to "face consequences" if they "talk tough" and joked about killing Bill Clinton. Her speech was so foul that even Michelle Malkin (who, as you may recall, is best known for writing a book defending the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II) felt obligated to offer up a rather tepid criticism of Coulter (while dismissing her remarks as Ann just "going for a cheap laugh").

Should Ann Coulter, as vile as much of what she says is, be thrown in jail for "hate speech"?

My guess is that Boyes would probably say "yes."

I say no. Our freedom depends on free speech, and one price for that freedom is tolerating offensive speech from people we don't like, no matter how much our dislike of them, what they say, and what they stand for might tempt us just to throw them in jail.

Locked out of ScienceBlogs

If anyone sees this...

My new ScienceBlogs blog is screwed up. Movable Type won't let me publish or rebuild the blog. It lets me get into the control panel and even lets me see my posts and your comments, but despite their showing up as "published," they do not show up on the blog. Attempts to rebuild the blog time out, as do any attempts to republish the posts and comments in question. Consequently I can't post, and your comments aren't showing up.

I'm starting to miss Blogger.

I'll post another announcement when things are working again.

Orac is dead! Long live Orac

Well, it's finally come. Today is the day to say goodbye.

No, not goodbye to you, my readers, but goodbye to Blogspot and this Blogger blog. In a way, this is a bit bittersweet, but then over the weekend an altie comment spammer unleashed the worst spam attack Respectful Insolence has ever weathered, necessitating my deleting a whole slew of comment spam.

It's time to go.

So, everyone, please set your bookmarks to my new location:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence

Also, I've registered the domain respectfulinsolence.net. Presently, it's set to redirect traffic to this blog. Later today, I will reset it to redirect to my new location. There is a link to my new RSS feed on the new blog.

Please update your bookmarks.

To bloggers out there who are kind enough to have me on their blogroll, I'd really appreciate it if you would update your blogroll link to the new URL above.

This blog will remain as an archive site for my old posts and as a place to put the occasional post that doesn't fit in with my new blog.

Orac (from Blogspot) is dead! Long live Orac at ScienceBlogs!

My second to last post

This will be my second to last post here at the present blog. As announced before, on Monday this blog will be moving over to ScienceBlogs. It's been an eventful 14 months here, but it's time to shake things up. Not all change is bad, and I think this change will be good in at least a couple of ways. First, it will bring the insolence to a potentially much bigger audience, and, second, it will hopefully inspire me to sharpen my science writing.

In any case, as my last post here, the new URL will be announced on Monday, and I hope you'll join me (not to mention update all your bookmarks and, if you're a blogger or have linked to me on a website, your blogroll). The old blog will remain for the forseeable future as an archive site.

The Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching

Time flies. Not only is my move to ScienceBlogs imminent, but the next Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching. It's scheduled to be posted on Thursday, February 16 at Unused and Probably Unusable. The deadline is 8 PM EST on February 15, and the call for submissions is here. Let's make this one in honor of the Amazing Randi, who is presently recovering from heart surgery.

Meeting short take #6: Terra Sigillata comments on the recent saw palmetto trial so I don't have to

Normally, this would be a topic that I'd take on full tilt. Fortunately, Abel Pharmboy explains the recent trial showing no benefit from saw palmetto in prostate hypertrophy. He also brings up a complaint that I've made about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, mainly, its lack of scientific rigor and the poor quality of the grants it funds:

Anyone associated with drug discovery and development whether in academia or industry will tell you how extreme the guidelines are for chemical composition and purity of any drug product intended for clinical trials. Yet, NCCAM continues to fund expensive clinical trials of botanical therapies even when the chemicals purported to be responsible for biological activity(ies) are unknown. In the rush to show clinical utility, this funding agency has taken shortcuts on the basic science studies necessary to precede any clinical trial, perhaps hoping that one day they will get a positive result. Instead, they are racking up a series of high-profile failures that cast a broad shadow across all natural products research and creating public relations challenges for otherwise well-meaning herbal education and trade groups.

Only now has NCCAM revealed that they probably should fund investigations of basic science, mechanisms of action, and, be-still-my-heart, phase I pharmacokinetic trials.

Since its inception in 1992 as the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, NCCAM has been a lightning rod for criticism of how the scientific method has been abandoned in favor of trying to show that ideological therapies work. Basic scientists in pharmacognosy and natural products chemistry were enthusiastic initially that a new funding source would be available to support their work. However, NCCAM was charged with reviewing all types of alternative therapies, from the more legitimate realm of herbal medicine to the implausible, homeopathy, for example. Review panels were stocked with individuals who had never held an NIH grant, much less with experience reviewing grant applications. An unusually high percentage of dietary supplement industry and trade group panelists infiltrated the peer-review system. In 2002, Quackwatch.com reported that just ten individual investigators held more than 20% of the NCCAM budget. I'd encourage Dr. Sampson to conduct another assessment today.

Read the whole thing.

Meeting short take #5: The Clergy Letter Project

Here's a good idea.

From all the controversy over the attempt by fundamentalists to block the teaching of evolution and get the teaching of intelligent design creationism in public school science classes, it's easy to forget that there are a lot of Christians out there, even very conservative ones, who rightly don't see a threat to their faith from the teaching of evolution. In the Clergy Letter Project, a group of pastors, spearheaded by Michael Zimmerman, are trying to rally the faithful in support of good science:

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

As of February 3, there were 10,252 signatures to the letter. And, on Darwin Day, they are proposing a discussion of the role of science and religion:

On 12 February 2006 hundreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders will bring this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups. Together, participating religious leaders will be making the statement that religion and science are not adversaries. And, together, they will be elevating the quality of the national debate on this topic.

Here's hoping Zimmerman's project can make a difference. They have a long way to go, if this rant is any indication.

Meeting short take #4: Andrew Mathis tells it like it is

I didn't have time to write anything of my own last night; so let me direct you to Andrew Mathis' commentary on an editorial that got his dander up:

You state that "Islam is compatible with modern secular society." I would counter that, at least in its fundamentalist form, it is not. Nor is any religion, but I will explain that shortly. The problem with Islam in secular societies is that, like Judaism before it, Islam is not merely a religion; it imposes a social system on its followers. In its fundamentalist form, therefore, it is completely incompatible with secular society. Just because (using your examples) the Prince of Wales points out (correctly) that European civilization owes much to Islam for its advancement beyond the Dark Ages or because one Muslim Emperor in India (where, incidentally, he ruled as a minority religious leader over a majority of Hindus) is said to have "laid the foundations of a secular state" does not mean that Islam as a whole is fundamentally compatible with secular society. Arguably, decades before the reign of Akbar in India, Martin Luther, by defying the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, laid the foundation of secular society in Europe. You note that Christian Europe, during this time, was entering the Reformation, but you conflate this statement with the expulsion (fifty years earlier) of Jews and Muslims from Europe (really only from Spain and Portugal), when, in fact, the Reformation ushered in a period of religious tolerance in Europe not seen beforehand.

Indeed. The problem is not necessarily Islam per se, but rather fundamentalism in religion that allows no room for other views.

Read the rest.

Meeting short take #3: Iran proposes a "Holocaust cartoon contest"

This is just too bizarre for me not to mention it, meeting or no meeting (you didn't think I could ignore this, did you?):

TEHRAN, Iran - A prominent Iranian newspaper said Tuesday it would hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West extends the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Hamshahri, one of Iran's largest papers, made clear the contest is a reaction to European newspapers' publication of Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which have led to demonstrations, boycotts and attacks on European embassies across the Islamic world. Several people have been killed.

Hundreds of Iranians hurled stones, and sometimes gasoline bombs, at the Danish and Austrian embassies in Tehran in protest against the cartoons Monday. Austria currently holds the European Union presidency.

The newspaper said the contest would be launched Monday and co-sponsored by the House of Caricatures, a Tehran exhibition center for cartoons. The paper and the cartoon center are owned by the Tehran Municipality, which is dominated by allies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, well-known for his opposition to Israel.

Ahmadinejad, who was Tehran's mayor until being elected president in June, provoked outcries last year when he said on separate occasions that Israel should be "wiped off the map" and the Holocaust was a "myth."

Iran said last month it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, an apparent attempt to give voice to Holocaust deniers.

Hamshahri invited foreign cartoonists to enter the competition.

"Does the West extend freedom of expression to the crimes committed by the United States and Israel, or an event such as the Holocaust? Or is its freedom only for insulting religious sanctities?" Hamshahri wrote, referring to the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

My first reaction to learning of this news was: How would anyone notice the difference? Iran and many other Muslim nations in the Middle East routinely publish the most vile, anti-Semitic cartoons, as well as a number of cartoons that preach Holocaust denial. What's a few more such cartoons among bigots? (As an aside, I've always stood in awe at the cognitive dissonance that people like this must have to allow them to deny the Holocaust and yet at the same time indiscriminately equate the treatment of the Palestinians by Israelis with the Nazi treatment of Jews. If, as these Holocaust deniers claim, the Holocaust didn't happen, then equating Israel with Nazi Germany is pretty pointless as a means of demonization of Jews. But I digress.)

My second reaction, though, was a bit of amusement. By announcing this contest, the Iranians seem to be implying that the Jews control Denmark, that they must think that it had to be the eeeeviillll Jews that were responsible for the publication of the cartoons. Otherwise, why not a contest for cartoons making fun of Christianity? Or a contest for cartoons making fun of, say, Buddhism or Hinduism (sacred cows, anyone)? Heck, why not a contest making fun of atheists, given how secular Denmark and much of Europe is? But, no. It has to be a contest for cartoons making fun of the Holocaust, a contest to attack Jews. (Of course, anti-Semitic cartoons are not unknown in Europe.) Besides revealing Iranian anti-Semitism, it's a transparent ploy. I can see it now. When the "winning" cartoons are published, Iran will "challenge" European papers to show their support for "freedom of speech" and republish them, as they did the Danish cartoons. When European nations refuse to play their game and republish such garbage, Iran will most likely gloat about a European double standard. Clearly the irony of Iranian media making such a charge against anyone is completely lost on them.

In fact, historian Deborah Lipstadt is preparing to enter the contest, with her collection of anti-Semitic cartoons from Arab and Muslim nations that she's been collecting over the years. She even has an idea for prizes for the winners:

1st Prize: One week in Teheran with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the Holocaust-denying President of Iran)

2nd Prize: Two weeks in Teheran with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

3rd Prize: 450 days in the former American embassy with those nice hostage takers.

Hmmm. Compared with the prospect of spending "quality" time with a hatemonger like Ahmadinejad, the prospect of 450 days as a hostage doesn't sound quite as horrible as it normally would otherwise. I'm sure Professor Lipstadt must have been joking. Mostly.

One thing's almost certain, though. There won't be any mass rioting, threats of beheading and murder, or bombings by Jews upset over Iran's pointless "retaliation."

Meeting short take #2: Tolerance towards intolerance

I made it to the meeting. I hate transcontinental flights, but this one wasn't too bad. Because I've been busy putting the final touches on a talk I have to give, I only have time for a couple of short takes. First, there's this spot-on article addressing the controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed:

In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe's supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules...

On Friday the State Department found it appropriate to intervene. It blasted the publication of the cartoons as unacceptable incitement to religious hatred. It is a peculiar moment when the government of the United States, which likes to see itself as the home of free speech, suggests to European journalists what not to print.

Indeed. I've often criticized laws against Holocaust denial in some countries in Europe on the basis of their infringement on free speech, even though the speech that is criminalized by them is speech I find particularly odious and despicable. A couple of times, I've even been a bit smug about our First Amendment, which presumably makes it more difficult for the U.S. government to engage in such restrictions of free speech. Sadly, it would appear that our own government does not wish even to try to live up to the values of the First Amendment.

Meeting short take #1: The Amazing Randi is recovering from heart surgery

Even at my meeting, I couldn't help but mention this. For those who might not know yet:

James Randi underwent bypass surgery last Thursday. He is currently in stable condition. He is receiving excellent care, but will need quiet time to recover. We will release more information as it becomes available, and we ask everyone to please respect the family’s wishes for privacy at this time.

For those who feel a need to help, please consider donating blood at your local Red Cross or Community Blood Center. Cards may be sent to Randi in care of JREF, 201 SE 12 Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316.

I had heard through another forum that Randi had had a heart attack recently. Here's hoping for a speedy recovery!

Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no 20

Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 20 has been posted at Science and Politics. Never let it be said I don't point my readers to good reading while I'm away. Bora has gathered a veritable cornucopia of the best medblogging from the last week.

Announcements

A couple of quick announcements:

1. As of this morning, I'm out of town for a surgical meeting for a few days. I'll probably keep posting, but not as regularly as usual. Also, I have no idea whether or not I'll have time to write anything that long. As always when I go to a meeting, it depends upon whether or not I'm bored when the meeting isn't actually going on.
   


2. Mainly because I'm going to be away for a few days, Seed Magazine and I have agreed that it's best that my blog not be moved over to ScienceBlogs this week. Consequently, I plan on officially moving Respectful Insolence over to ScienceBlogs on the morning of Monday, February 13. My first article on the new blog will be posted then, and an announcement will be posted here with the new URL. Get ready to update your bookmarks and blogrolls.

I'm looking forward to this move and the opportunity it provides. I hope you'll all follow me over there next week.

The budget situation for the NIH appears grim

From ScienceNOW:

In stark contrast to his initiative for physical sciences [ScienceNOW, 1 February and 3 February], President Bush today proposed a budget freeze for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2007, holding its funding steady at $28.6 billion. The proposal, part of the President's overall budget request to Congress, is drawing concern and even outrage from biomedical research advocacy groups, who worry that NIH is losing ground after its budget was doubled from 1999 to 2003. Now the budget proposal, which curbs domestic discretionary spending while boosting funding for national defense, must wind its way through Congress before being approved in some form later this year.

"We're not in a position to do as much as many of us would like," said Michael Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, at a budget briefing today. When asked why biomedicine was not included among the science agencies funded by the president's American Competitiveness Initiative, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni explained that the physical sciences are "complementary" to NIH's mission. "I don't think biomedicine is necessarily less urgent ... but you have to make choices that are not necessarily going to make everybody happy."

Within the $28.587 million requested for NIH in 2007, only biodefense would garner a significant increase--$110 million for a new biodefense fund to help universities and companies commercialize countermeasures. Another $49 million would expand an initiative on genes, environment, and health, and $15 million would fund a new bridge award for young investigators. But overall, all but one of NIH's 27 institutes and centers will get a slight cut under the president's plan. In parallel, success rates on grants--an investigator's odds of winning funding for a grant proposal--would remain at 19% in 2007, down from 22% in 2005.

Advocacy groups warn about the danger to U.S. biomedical research from a flat budget coming on the heels of the first cut to NIH in 36 years. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Washington, D.C., expressed "disappointment and outrage," saying the president's NIH request will slow research and "discourage the best and brightest from scientific careers." And while Patrick White�of the Association of American Universities praises the "incredible" boost proposed for the physical sciences, he says the "hard freeze" for NIH�"begins the undoubling of the NIH budget." A coalition of advocacy groups wants Congress to give NIH a 5% increase.

It looks as though the President's promise to boost science funding only applies to some areas and not others. While I'm glad that more is being allocated to the NSF, between the flat NIH budget and this administration's politicization of science, particularly stem cell research, we as a nation are taking a real risk of slowing down the progress in biomedical research that we have made over the last decade. With a flat budget for the foreseeable future, which translates in practical terms in to small yearly budget cuts, it looks as though we're going back to the bad old days of the early 1990's as far as biomedical research funding goes.

How vaccine litigation distorts the contents of the VAERS database

Advocates who are convinced of a link between the mercury in thimerosal used in vaccines as a preservative and autism often point to data derived from the U. S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as "evidence" that vaccines cause autism. For example, Mark and David Geier, the father-son team of Don Quixotes of the thimerosal/autism movement, have made a veritable career of dumpster-diving the VAERS database and then using the results as their preferred lance to tilt at their windmills--not to mention to use as "evidence" in representing parents suing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VCIP). Publications by the Geiers utilizing the VAERS database are often used by litigants as "evidence" for a link between mercury in vaccines and autism.

Unfortunately, the VAERS database is highly unreliable. The reason is that anyone can submit a report to it, and no one actually verifies the accuracy of the report. Indeed, James Laidler once tested the system by submitting a report that the influenza virus had turned him into The Incredible Hulk. The report was accepted and duly entered into the database. This report was so out of the ordinary that a representative actually contacted him and, amazingly, asked his permission to remove the report from the database (proving that it's not easy being green). If Laidler had not given it, the report of an adverse reaction in which the flu vaccine turned a man into a huge, immensely powerful green monster would still be in VAERS. Now, via Kathleen Seidel, who alerted me to this, comes more evidence of the corruption of the VAERS database. This evidence comes in the form of a study published in the most recent issue of the journal Pediatrics, in which the authors examine the question of how much of the seeming increase in autism related to vaccines reported to the VAERS database over the last several years might be related to litigation. Naturally, I couldn't resist downloading the complete article and reading it.

In the study, the authors, Michael J. Goodman and James Nordin, did something incredibly simple that no one had done before. They took data from the VAERS database from 1990 through 2003 and imported it into SAS data files for analysis. Then they searched the database using key words to look for reports associated with litigation, particularly with regards to autism. They searched for records containing "thimerosal," "mercury," or "autism" in their fields, especially when coupled with terms like "lawyer," "legal," "attorney," or "litigate," while excluding records containing "legal" coupled with the term "guardian" that did not relate to litigation. They also excluded cases related to well characterized allergic reactions to thimerosal. Finally, they compared records from nonlitigation cases to those from litigation cases regarding symptomatology reported.

Not surprisingly, beginning in 2001, they noted a dramatic increase in the number of non-Lyme disease VAERS reports related to litigation, from only 7 in 2000 to 213 in 2002 and 108 in 2003. (They attributed the decline in 2003 reports to processing delays in creating public use files.) Next, they examined symptom sets related to symptom sets. For autism, they observed a dramatic increase in the percentage of litigation-related reports from 0% of the reports related to litigation in 1999 to over one-third (35%) in 2002. For records mentioning thimerosal that weren't related to allergic reactions, the rise was even more dramatic, from 0% of these reports related to litigation in 2000 to 87% in 2002.

This study once again hammers home the inherent unreliability of the VAERS database as a tool for longitudinal studies of the rate of vaccine-related complications. Not only can anyone access it and enter reports without verification, but there is no denominator, which means testing for causality is not even possible with VAERS. Worse, as the authors point out, the rate of reporting of autism as a complication of vaccines is easily influenced by numerous external factors. For example, the authors pointed out that 75% of the autism reports in VAERS between 1990 and 2001 were received not long after the the publication of the the now utterly and completely discredited Wakefield study that claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and that 2/3 were received after the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that thimerosal be removed from vaccines. And it's not just autism. For example, in 2002, half the reports to the VAERS database about mental retardation were related to litigation. The authors conclude:

The findings raise an important question about possible misuse of VAERS in the litigation process. When a study is being used to influence important public health decisions, it is important that reviewers and editors fully understand how the data were constructed and their source. Until now, no one has described the magnitude of litigation-related reporting and how these reports might potentially change the results of studies using VAERS data. Longitudinal studies using VAERS data should explicitly take into account changes in reporting sources like the one described in this article.

It is impossible to determine the effect of these reports on existing analyses because the existing literature does not describe carefully inclusion and exclusion criteria. For the conditions reviewed here, it is apparent that a large enough percentage of reports are being made related to litigation that failure to exclude these will seriously skew trends. This is important for vaccines that contain thimerosal, and specifically for the MMR vaccine because of the controversy surrounding its relationship to autism. It therefore is incumbent on the authors who use VAERS data to provide detailed methods sections that describe their inclusion and exclusion criteria. To that end, we are making our SAS code available to interested parties. It is not sufficient simply to reference extraction of the VAERS data set.

Indeed it is not. Computer programmers have a famous saying: "Garbage in, garbage out," meaning that the quality of the results of an analysis can be no better than the quality of the data upon which the analysis relies. Without correction for factors such as the ones for which the authors of this study tried to correct, the VAERS database definitely qualifies as "garbage in" when used to try to follow the incidence of vaccine-related complications over time. The VAERS database may serve a very important function as an early warning system for potential vaccine-related complications that were not picked up in initial clinical trials used to gain FDA approval, but it was never intended to be a means of following the rates of these complications in a longitudinal fashion. Even if it had been, the ease with which the rate of entry of various complications can be influenced by media hype and activists, as well as the indiscriminate use of the database by litigants, long ago destroyed any usefulness that VAERS might have had for such a purpose.

Indeed, it's even worse than described. The authors themselves recognize that they very well may have underestimated the effect of litigation-related VAERS reports:

Our results are probably conservative. Discussions with VAERS staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about reports that are generated from the VICP indicate that we may have missed some litigation-related cases because our code identified only a subset of these cases (John Iskander, personal communication, August 6, 2004). We tested code to identify VICP cases but were unable to find a way to identify them. Underascertainment of cases that are related to litigation, however, only strengthens our point. The influence of the litigation process on longitudinal analyses is a serious matter and emphasizes the importance of interpreting VAERS data cautiously.

In other words, the distorting effect of litigation-related cases on reports to the VAERS database is almost certainly worse than this first study suggests. I'm betting that it would be even worse still if the authors had been able to analyze the complete data sets from the years 2004 and 2005, given the firestorm that erupted last year due to the publication of David Kirby's much hyped conspiracy-mongering "expose" Evidence of Harm and the thoroughly dishonest scaremongering scandal piece by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published last summer. Perhaps the authors of this study will update their analysis when VAERS data for 2004 and 2005 become available. I might be going out on a limb here (not really), but I'd predict a huge jump in litigation-related VAERS entries for cases alleging that that vaccines caused autism in the year 2005. I'm also hoping that the authors manage to ovecome the difficulties they encountered and figure out a way to crossreference their data from the VAERS database with the list of litigants going before the VCIP. I predict that the results of such a study would be most illuminating. However, this is a study that, because of HIPAA regulations, will most likely never be done because it would probably require doing what Mark and David Geier once tried to do: Merging data sets in such a way that could risk patient confidentiality.

In the meantime, whenever someone tells you that the VAERS database shows that cases of autism related to vaccines have been rising, just remember two things: (1) garbage in=garbage out; and (2) the VAERS database, sadly, has evolved into a trial lawyer's best friend.

Just ask Mark and David Geier.

Respectful Insolence discreditase?

There are worse things than being included as an enzyme in a chart on the Metabolism of Evolution Information in the Blogos