Gov. Rick Perry ordered Friday that schoolgirls in Texas must be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, making Texas the first state to require the shots.
The girls will have to get Merck & Co.'s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer.
Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass laws in state legislatures across the country mandating it Gardasil vaccine for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.
...
Perry has several ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company's three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, his former chief of staff. His current chief of staff's mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.
...
Perry also received $6,000 from Merck's political action committee during his re-election campaign.
...
/cynic mode ON
Welcome to Utopia. Now we vaccinate your children for sexually transmitted diseases. Please report to Central Immunization immediately. Failure to comply within seven days will result in quarantine.
/cynic mode OFF
I don't believe this. I'm dumbfounded. Corporate cronyism at it's boldest. If this comes to your state, not only should you say no, you should say HELL NO. Since when is it the State's place to give preventative STD vaccines to children? I know the carrot here is oh it's such a great thing, it prevents cervical cancer. But is cervical cancer really a US health epidemic? Everything I've read says otherwise.
Even if you trust the State to inject whatever they deem necessary into your children, think about the economics here. $360 a head for the vaccine treatments. Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to provide education about the importance of regular pap smears? Even if you get this vaccine, you still need them anyway.
And yes, I did not miss the part about an affidavit being available to opt out. I won't bore you with stories I've read about how that has been abused in the past, where kids were quarantined then the parents were charged with truancy, etc... Hit me up if you want the skinny on that.
4. While we're on the subject of liability, lawsuits, and profits, there's another angle to consider. If Merck can get state governments to put Gardasil on their lists of vaccines that are required for schoolchildren, it can become a part of a federal vaccine liability program. Meaning that Merck will not be liable if Gardasil turns out to be harmful some time in the future.
5. There have been no long-term studies done on the effect of the vaccine after 5-10 or more years, and testing on young girls has been extremely limited.
6. It is unknown how long the immunity provided by Gardasil actually lasts.
7. The studies done on Gardasil were not set up to investigate whether the vaccine itself has the potential to cause cancer.
RE: Florida Shifting to Voting System With Paper Trail - New York Times
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:16 am EST, Feb 2, 2007
janelane wrote:
DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 — Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.
AWESOME! Death to Diebold!
-janelane
/conspiracy hat ON
Wonder who will provide/run the counting machines?
/conspiracy hat OFF
If Florida still uses faulty data for scrubbing their voter roles, this new counting method is probably much ado about nothing. A good step for sure, I followed the Diebold machinations very closely back in the day, but I still think the best method of counting votes is by hand.
Here's my preferred method: After the votes are cast, have representatives from each party count all votes by hand. You can distribute the task across precincts to accomplish this. Party A counts all votes, Party B counts them, etc... At the end, you make sure every Party's tally equals that of the others. It doesn't? Recount. It does? Now you have a pretty good idea that everyone agrees with the count.
Acidus wrote: 1- I was on the high school swim team for 3 years, and went to the Georgia State swim meet for my junior year. I was supposed to go my senior year, but got kicked off. My crime? While doing a can-opener as my last dive for the last regular swim meet, I purposely mooned the entire crowd, included the superintendent for Cobb County Schools.
2- I've forgotten my mom's brithday on at least 3 different occasions. She's never been mad, just sad.
3- I was born in a hospital less than 2 miles from where I currently work.
4- My Brother has been around the world and climbed some of the tallest mountains. I've never left the western hemisphere and I've only been west of the Mississippi river 5 times, 3 of which were in the last year.
5- I have 2 Hillary Duff songs on an iPod playlist. I sing them when I drive.
Well, we have #3 in common :) I'm surprised you admitted to #5.
What are your 5 things?
Hmm... Never thought about it, but what the yell, this sounds fun!
1. I was raised in a Church of Christ until I was 20 years old. Rarely if ever missed a Sunday service.
2. I enjoyed swordfighting with PVC pipe swords "padded" with pipe insulation and duct tape during my high school years. We'd go nearly year-round every week, meeting up in a local park to wail on each other. We called it "The Guild." Amazed no one was ever seriously hurt.
3. I won a city wide art contest in high school and had a few pieces selected to show at Cheekwood here in Nashville. Never got my artwork back though, it disappeared. Grr... Should have taken pics.
4. I can place $2.50 of quarters in my nose, $1.25 in each nostril. How did I find this out? Boredom.
5. Astronomy was my first intellectual pursuit. My mom sold Worldbook Encyclopedia when I was learning to read and I cut my "teeth" on the Childcraft Space/Astronomy book. The first book I ever checked out of a library was an Astronomy book. When queried what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was always, "An astronomer." When asked did I mean astronaut, I'd say, "No. An astronomer."
"The only nigger on the planet is the white man and the white woman."
"You are either supporting the white people in their process of death, or you're for African liberation, it's one or the other."
"We have to exterminate white people off the face of this planet to solve this problem."
* * *
Okay. Sometimes I get bored and I type random things into Google, Youtube, whatever. Tonight, I typed in "kill whitey" and was treated to the video above.
A 10 minute tirade by Dr. Leroy Jefferson aka Kamau Kambon. I don't find this threatening. I find it quite hilarious actually. It made me laugh.
He runs a bookstore in Raleigh, NC. I'd like to have a sit down with this guy and really pick his brain.
He's got enough things right with the retina scanning, the DNA banks, the racial profiling, the constant montitoring. But the (not unfounded) paranoia of these events to come has somehow melded with the anger he feels about what has happened to his ancestors and has brought him to the conclusion that this Orwellian control grid being implemented is just the white man's tool to further hold down the black man. His recommended solution? Kill whitey.
Desire for power knows no race. Power is fleeting though, throughout history that's the lesson to be learned. I just wonder what leads a well educated person to arrive at such a rash conclusion, that killing a race would somehow help things for another race? Guess it's like fighting fire with fire in their mind, a logical calculation of sacrificing some to save the many.
RE: Senator wants restrictions on social networking sites | Capitol Updates
Topic: Society
1:37 pm EST, Jan 30, 2007
Decius wrote:
A Georgia senator worried about the safety of young teenagers who log on to Internet social networking sites such as MySpace.com and FaceBook.com has proposed a bill that would force such companies to tighten up their access to minors.
The measure would make it illegal for the owner or operator of a social networking Web site to allow minors to create or maintain a Web page without parental permission. Senate Bill 59 also would force MySpace.com and FaceBook.com to allow parents or guardians to have access to their children’s Web pages at all times.
Oh great. Looks like this is going to be an interesting few months. Here is the bill.
When does this come up for vote?
I don't see how this could be enforced. Say it was passed, and now Memestreams has to comply. You have to now add some logic that checks if their DOB is < 18 years from today. If so, you now have fields for the parents? Contact #'s for the parents? Does this become like the old BBS days where you voice verified?
What's to stop A) False DOB B) False parental information? So the person you call back is their older sibling and they say, "Sure, go ahead."
Now how do you deliver the credentials to the parents? Do the parents have to login first to begin with?
This bill has no details whatsoever. What generally happens with these? Are these bills generally "function prototypes" for lack of a better word that are later fleshed out after adopted?
Very curious to see how this goes. I'm guessing it will be shot down without a second thought based on how poorly it is authored, but you never know.
NoDaddy.Com - Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names
Topic: Technology
8:56 pm EST, Jan 29, 2007
Fyodor has started NoDaddy.com in response to last week's shutdown of seclists.org...
I created this site to document instances of customer abuse at GoDaddy. The goal is for GoDaddy to either improve their policies and customer service, or suffer continued loss of market share to their customer-focused competition.
While I gave this site its bare skeleton, I'm hoping it becomes more of a community effort. If you have been frustrated by GoDaddy's behavior, please see our call for volunteers and join in.
Screw Seclists.com, you should higher an internet security employee from MySpace to make sure you don't post our personal, highly secure information on your website. Obviously you aren't capable or maybe you just don't understand internet law.
Talk about Comedy Gold! The layers of irony in that passage are so thick its like a work of art!
sarahflynn wrote: "If being well liked is more important than being yourself, then you will never say anything of value and you will never have true friends. If you don’t have the balls to be hated, then you don’t deserve to be loved"
I don't watch TV these days, but I occasionally see the fare that is passed off as programming if I'm at someone else's house. I imagine nothing like this is on the airwaves anymore. What with "24" and the glorification of torture, a character that says we should have "due process" probably wouldn't sell in today's popular culture.
