I’ve given up on watching TV news, at least until the “BP Gulf Oil Spill” saga is over. I’m simply tired of hearing earnest-sounding news anchors earnestly intone “the largest oil spill in American history.” With absolutely no background information – other than a vague idea about the Exxon Valdez – those words are pretty meaningless to the average American.

Today CNN was saying that the spill is “roughly the size of South Carolina.” Again – most people simply don’t have a clue how big South Carolina is…especially compared to the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s some data to put things in perspective: South Carolina contains 32,020 square miles (more or less) while the Gulf of Mexico covers over 615,000 square miles. The United States, alone, is over 1,680 miles long.

The reason the newsies are saying “the worst in American history” is that the US has been relatively clear of oil-related disasters. It has already surpassed the Exxon Valdez, but that isn’t saying much, in global terms. Only about eleven million gallons of oil were released. Compare that to the “granddaddy of them all: The Persian Gulf spill during the Gulf War released well over 240 million gallons of oil. The BP Gulf spill currently ranks about 19th.

It is informative, however, to understand that the current number two spot is held by Ixtoc 1 – also an offshore well blowout. That started in June of 1979 and it wasn’t fully under control until after relief wells had been completed in March of the following year. Over 3.5 million barrels were spilled. And that was with an intact blowout preventer (that was closed, but had to be reopened because of high pressure).

I’m not trying to say that things aren’t going to be desperate for folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (and parts of Florida). Where the slick hits, it is going to be really, really bad. What I’m trying to say is that the coverage of the disaster is a disaster of its own. The real question, in my mind, is why no one involved had a plan for dealing with a blowout. After that, it’s why they had no plan to deal with containment. Beyond that, I’m asking why the Gulf States apparently had no plan in waiting for dealing with such a problem.

The headline is more than a bit shocking: AstraZeneca to pay $520M over drug Seroquel. Half a billion dollars. Wow.

The case involves AstraZeneca promoting Seroquel for uses that are not approved by federal drug regulators, including insomnia and psychiatric conditions besides schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Oh. My. FREAKING. God.

They develop a drug for schizophrenia and tell doctors that it’s okay to use it for a sleep aid? Those two problems are worlds apart. Worlds. I mean, if you can’t fall asleep, you can try drinking a beer. But that ain’t gonna help you with the hallucinations or delusions. Seems like a medication aimed at hallucinations and/or delusions would be a bit much for a sleeping pill.

U.S. Attorney Michael Levy of Philadelphia, where the settlement was filed, said that the company had “turned patients into guinea pigs in an unsupervised drug test.”

And you know what? They’ll do it again – because of this following paragraph:

Partly because of all the off-label use of Seroquel, the drug brought in $4.9 billion to AstraZeneca in 2009, making it the company’s second-best seller.

Here’s the deal: You advise doctors to over-medicate their patients and make $4.9 billion in one year and then they only have to pay a half-billion-dollar fine (not even, actually)…and any businessman in the world will say that it’s a good deal.

One of the primary reasons for regulation is to enforce some sort of morality on the open market. On that point, this “record settlement” is an epic failure.

A very sad story:

In a closed courtroom in one of the few government buildings still standing here, Laura Silsby and nine other American missionaries were charged Thursday with abducting children from this earthquake-ravaged capital.

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or Ms. Silsby it was the latest in a series of wrong turns on a road her parents and others who know her in Idaho say was paved with the best intentions.

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Ms. Silsby had purchased a two-story house in Meridian, where a neighbor said she was known for her blue Lexus convertible and her dog, Bentley. Her financial difficulties mounted last year. Idaho court records show several judgments against Ms. Silsby in 2009. Activity in the offices of Ms. Silsby’s business, Personal Shopper Inc., visibly slowed, said Scotty Bates, a manager at SpeedyQuick Networks Inc., an Internet service provider whose office is in the same building as Personal Shopper. On Thursday, Personal Shopper’s offices were locked and dark.

Personal Shopper, whose Web site personalshopper.com, promises to guide shoppers to products that fit their needs, won Ms. Silsby a 2006 award as International Businesswoman of the Year from eWomen Network, a Texas-based international businesswomen’s group. By last year it also was facing suits.

One suit, filed in federal court in Miami, alleged that Personal Shopper owed more than $320,000 to Florida-based TSG Media Inc. The suit was settled in November 2008, according to an attorney for TSG, David Filler. He declined to disclose the terms of the settlement, but he said that Personal Shopper failed to make good on the settlement.

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Last week, the group entered Haiti from the Dominican Republic, met with the pastor and gathered a group of children, Mr. Ham said. The group had signed permission “to take children from Haiti back to the Dominican Republic,” as well as documentation from the Dominican Republic itself, he said. But when the group got to the border, Haitian officials told the group they lacked “one document,” Mr. Ham said.

Carlos Castillo, the Dominican Republic’s consul general in Port-au-Prince, gave a different account: In an interview he said he met with Ms. Silsby on Friday and told her she lacked any documents to transport children, and warned her not to try or she could be arrested.

Yeah, this story is just sad and sick in all too many ways.

Thus saith the Lord:

Get thee post haste to Haiti and swipest thou some darkling children in their tender years so that thou mightest destroy the ties of culture and family, and takest them thou to the ironically named “black market” to sell them for adoption to holier-than-thou couples who will congratulate themselves on supporting human trafficking because they love in My name!

Yeah, I’m sure I remember reading that in the Bible.

Exactly as most of us who bothered to consider the causal relationship thought: Vaccines do not cause autism:

A major British medical journal on Tuesday retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease.

The retraction by The Lancet comes a day after a competing medical journal, BMJ, issued an embargoed commentary calling for The Lancet to formally retract the study. The commentary was to have been published on Wednesday.

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Since the controversial paper was published, British parents abandoned the vaccine in droves, leading to a resurgence of measles. Subsequent studies have found no proof that the vaccine is connected to autism, though some parents are still wary of the shot.

In Britain, vaccination rates for measles have never recovered and there are outbreaks of the disease every year.

Ten of Wakefield’s 13 co-authors renounced the study’s conclusions several years ago and The Lancet has previously said it should never have published the research.

“We fully retract this paper from the published record,” Lancet editors said in a statement Tuesday.

Last week, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had shown a “callous disregard” for the children used in his study and acted unethically. Wakefield and the two colleagues who have not renounced the study face being stripped of their right to practice medicine in Britain.

For the study, Wakefield took blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party, paying them 5 pounds each ($8) for their contributions and later joking about the incident.

OK – for those of you paying attention – the guy who said MMR vaccines cause autism has been completely disgraced, stripped of his ability to practice medicine, and the publication has apologized for allowing such crap to sully its pages.

So get your kids immunized. Please.

The Washington Post asked several people to respond to Pat Robertson’s contention that the people of Haiti are being punished by God for making a pact with the devil. Jim Wallis chooses to sidestep the issue and simply says he is heartbroken. James Standish has a meatier answer, but he eventually shrugs and says, “People can’t judge God.” But, of course, people not only judge God, but also the people who claim to be God’s people.

Richard Dawkins, the Worlds Most Militant Atheist, has a different answer – anyone who believes in God and is appalled at Robertson is hypocritical. And Dawkins answer shows the shallowness of both answers given by Wallis and Standish. But Dawkins fails to see that there are different types of faith within the Christian tradition, including some that do not look for supernatural explanations for natural events.

There are actually two tragedies in Haiti. One is the natural tragedy caused by people being at the epicenter of an earthquake. So long as our planet moves, such things will happen. It doesn’t take the will of God for the earth to move. The forces of science explain it quite well.

While the 7.0 quake was strong, it wasn’t devastatingly strong. In 1999, Turkey was struck by two earthquakes, both of which were even stronger than the Haiti quake. But the death toll for the two quakes combined are less than that for the single quake in Haiti. The reason why is the second tragedy in Haiti.

A month ago, no one cared about Haiti. A month ago, Haiti had the highest poverty rate in the western hemisphere with 80% of its population living in poverty. No one really cared that two-thirds of Haiti’s exports are in the apparel industry, with workers making less than five bucks per day. No one really cared that nearly half of all Haitians are illiterate and the only real resource the island nation has is unskilled labor. Even before the quake, nearly 90% of Haitian children suffered from waterborne diseases and intestinal parasites.

In the absence of anyone actually pushing Haitian governments to improve the lives of their people – and the lack of any real ability to do so – Haiti has long been a sort of living hell for the people stuck there.

The question about Robertson is easily answered: Pat Robertson believes in a whimsically vengeful God. To my mind, he isn’t worth noticing. The problem is that you then have to deal with the underlying question: Why did God let this happen? Then answer is that God didn’t let this happen. We did. We should ask, not why God let an earthquake happen; but why did we turn away from such suffering for so long?

And, as I’ve pointed out already – are we really going to change it or are we just going to do enough to say that we did “something?”

From Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the “rejects of life,” to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands – whether of individuals or entire peoples – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work, and, working, transform the world.

I am very happy to see the outpouring of assistance for Haiti. God knows the poor people down there need all the assistance they can get. But, as aid stacks up because of a lack of infrastructure and the inability to move so much of everything at once, it is a good thing to pause a moment and ask: “What exactly are we hoping to accomplish?”

The stories of rescues are becoming rarer, and I suspect the stories of recovery are going to become all too common. Then the long process of clearing rubble will move forward. Then…rebuilding. But rebuilding what?

Are we going to use native labor, pouring our money into given Hatians jobs so that they can rebuild their country and then no longer need us? Will we use this as an opportunity to make a great leap forward for Haiti? Or are we just going to patch things together and then leave them to find their way out of hell on earth?

I have hopes that it is the first, even as I fear it will be the second. The American people, generous as they are, don’t look to be situated to support jobs programs in Haiti while we remain unemployed at home.

I have a lot of sympathy for the people of Haiti. I’m glad there are people who are on their way to help them dig out and rebuild. But, if I’m totally honest, I’m freaking tired of the news reports.

I think, at this point, anyone who is going to respond has. It has moved from legitimate news to prurient vulture-watching. And let’s be honest, no one cared about Haiti six days ago. No one is going to care about Haiti six months from now. The flash of sympathy will fade and those people will be re-sentenced to a horrible life of poverty and hardship.

Hell is other people. We make sure of it.

People are just wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay too sensitive:

Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco apologised on Tuesday after complaints that a Christmas card it sold was offensive to people with ginger hair.

The card in question shows a child with red hair sitting on the lap of Santa Claus under the banner: “Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones.”

Davinia Phillips, whose three children all have red hair, was enraged when she saw the card at one of Tesco’s stores in northern England.

“It’s discrimination, pure and simple. I have shown it to a lot of friends and they are all disgusted by it,” she was quoted by newspapers as saying.

It isn’t discrimination. It’s a joke. It isn’t a particularly funny one, but there isn’t – or shouldn’t be – a law against unfunny jokes, even tasteless ones.

And just because the card has a child on it does not mean it was meant to be sent to a child. Come on. I wouldn’t send it to an eight year old, but I might send it to my sister-in-law.

Okay, it’s over the limit – more than three bucks. So she’s out of luck.

Ceri Radford has my back.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

In that nonsensical statement lies this little country’s big challenge. Swiss voters appear to have been caught up in the general European fear – some real, some imagined, and some manufactured – of Islamic extremism and culture clash. What makes this particularly tough for the Swiss government, which opposed the ban, is how to tackle a vague fear.

The Swiss minister of justice said that the ban would likely be struck down in court because it’s incompatible with the Swiss Constitution and international human rights law. Illegal or not, it certainly steps on the idea of religious freedom and looks like discrimination.

Still, even if the ban, which is effective immediately, were struck down, how to root out that vague fear expressed in the vote?

Perhaps the answer lies less with the government, and more with individuals. In a response befitting one of the world’s major religions, the imam of Switzerland’s biggest mosque cautioned against a Muslim backlash.

“The Muslim world must respect, without accepting the decision. But it must respect the Swiss decision. Otherwise, we would be the first victims,” Youssef Ibram, imam at the Geneva mosque, told Agence France-Press.

The issue is the recent ban on minarets passed by Swiss referendum. That’s the “nonsensical statement” made by the Swiss electorate. But I’m going to argue that there’s a bigger statement being made, and it’s a lesson worth learning.

First, the point has to be made that a majority of Swiss voters indicated that they did not favor the ban. The logical question is: How can a majority oppose the ban and yet it passes? The answer is one of two things – either the polls were simply wrong (always a possibility) or something happened on the way to the polls.

I’m going to go with the second explanation (and say that an unpredictable turnout gives pollsters a fit). Switzerland’s direct democracy makes it easy to get things on a referendum ballot (only a hundred thousand signatures are needed in a country of roughly five million voters). There are also roughly two million people who are of voting age, but who are not allowed to cast a vote. Many of these people are considered immigrants, even though they may have been born in Switzerland. Moves to ease citizenship requirements were previously targeted by right-wing parties.

So to understand the results of Switzerland’s vote, it is first necessary to concede that the people most directly impacted by it – immigrants who are Muslims – were not allowed to vote at all. This is not democracy in action at all.

The second thing to understand is that Switzerland generally has low turnout – and this time was no exception. About 2.7 million votes were cast this past week, which is not that much more than the 2.6 million votes cast in February of this year. But nearly half of the Swiss voters chose not to cast a vote at all. This may be democracy, but it is a sad excuse for it.

These two points make it easy to understand how an unpopular measure could get passed on a popular vote. First, you don’t let those directly involved have a voice. Second, you have half of registered voters deciding that they will depend on someone else to do what is right. The result is fairly easy to predict.

There is a lesson in this for American activists. Hate and fear are strong motivators, while voting for someone else’s rights is not. While the proponents of the action focused on a grassroots campaign aimed at motivating their base, opponents relied on elites being able to mobilize support. The outcome is entirely predictable.