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Francis to meet with Catholics on the autism spectrum

Rather than seeing their Church as a refuge where they can meet God, parents of kids with autism often report that their children are more isolated than ever at Mass – either because other parishioners disapprove of their behavior, mistaking it for irreverence or a lack of discipline, or because the liturgy itself provides a sensory overload that is too much to bear, or because sitting quietly and listening is not always possible.

If you have a family member with autism, or if you are on the spectrum yourself, what would you say to the Pope? What would you like your fellow Catholics to know about what it’s like to a member of the Body of Christ who is on the autism spectrum — either while you’re at Mass or other church functions, or just in general?

Read the rest at the Register.

Are WHO and UNICEF secretly sterilizing Kenyan women with a tetanus vaccine? Maybe, but probably not.

Last week, the bishops of Kenya accused the WHO and UNICEF of secretly lacing a tetanus vaccine with a hormone intended to induce miscarriage and sterility in Kenyan women of childbearing age, in an effort to reduce the population. The bishops issued a press release, saying:

[W]e shall not waver in calling upon all Kenyans to avoid the tetanus vaccination campaign laced with Beta-HCG, because we are convinced that it is indeed a disguised population control programme.

We do know that the WHO and UNICEF do not take seriously the bodily integrity of poor families, especially women. The West has a shameful history of exploiting third world populations in the name of humanitarian efforts. So the bishops’ allegations are understandable, and if they are true, this is a dreadful crime against humanity. But if the allegations are false, then spreading the story could have disastrous results. Neonatal tetanus brings a prolonged and agonizing death to tens of thousands of children every year. If Kenyans are afraid to vaccinate against tetanus, people will die needlessly. That’s why I didn’t write about this story, even as it cropped up everywhere. All I could find was the same facts and sources in every story, no new information. Now we have some new information, and there is more on the horizon. The story is far from settled, but there are strong reasons to suspect that the bishops’ allegations arise from a misunderstanding and there has been no sterilization campaign. Catholic News Agency did an excellent job of reporting the story in a balanced way:

“There are aspects of this that need to be raising red flags because of history and because of the way it was all being done. But raising red flags doesn’t mean that there’s something that actually has occurred,” said Dr. Kevin Donovan, director of the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University.

The red flags are primarily: (a) that the vaccination campaign targeted women of childbearing age, raising suspicions that the effort was tied to population control, and (b) that, when the vaccine was tested at the request of the Kenyan bishops, hCG was found. HCG, in high enough quantities, can induce miscarriage and sterilization. But these red flags can both be explained.

The WHO said that they decided to focus the vaccination campaign on women of reproductive age “because of the focus on eliminating maternal and neonatal tetanus.” They also said that the methods needed to provide adequate protection against tetanus for unborn and newborn children require a different testing schedule than the one usually used for other forms of tetanus.

But what about the hCG detected in the vaccine? Why would it be in a tetanus vaccine at all, even in low levels “millions of times less than the amount needed to trigger this contraceptive response“? The WHO and Donovan both noted that the techniques used by the labs who tested the vaccines, and the reports they produced, are irregular and problematic. One likely explanation for the small levels of hCG detected? A false positive. Donovan explains:

“If these were labs that were using tips to test for pregnancy and such, they may not be the appropriate measuring techniques for picking up small amounts of hCG, leading to false positives.”

“I suspect that the tests that the hospital labs tried to do for the Catholic bishops weren’t really designed to test the way that they did, maybe giving them erroneous results,” he added.

For a detailed and rigorous explanation of why it is by no means certain that the tetanus vaccine is anything but a tetanus vaccine, Rational Catholic has once again done the legwork , sifting carefully through the possibilities of what may or may not have happened here, and explaining in detail how a false positive could have been found. Rational Catholic also notes:

I have seen the lab results from the tests performed at the request of the bishops in Kenya, and my understanding is that they will be published shortly in an online news source. I will update and link to them when that happens.

The main obstacle to finding the truth seems to be that the local government in Kenya did not initially take the bishops’ concerns seriously, but that may be changing.According to a Kenyan newspaper, (link courtesy of the Rational Catholic post)

[T]he Parliamentary Committee on Health ruled that a joint team of experts from the Ministry of Health, Catholic Church and other stakeholders would conduct a fresh round of independent medical tests to end the controversy on the safety of the vaccines.

There is mistrust and bad feeling on both sides, but it is clear that both the Kenyan bishops and the Kenyan government are eager to make sure that Kenyans are not dissuaded from protecting themselves from a vaccine that saves lives, so we can only pray that the new round of testing will be definitive and that the results will be shared in a clear and transparent way. In the mean time, I urge concerned readers with good intentions to stop spreading the story that the vaccine was deliberately and secretly contaminated. This has not been proven, and can only add to the general confusion about vaccine safety.

The Splat Life

PIC Wallace on train

The train is whizzing out of control, and he can’t get off, slow down, or change course. In desperation, Gromit snatches a box of spare tracks and frantically lays them on the floor ahead, just split seconds before the train he’s on thunders over them.

This is more or less what it’s like to raise a child. Yes, you have to work frantically to stay ahead of that train; but no, you’re not exactly in control.

Read the rest at the Register.

The Accidental Marriage book winner!

Congratulations to Serena Sigillito! Serena, be on the lookout for an email from me so you can claim your prize. Thanks for playing, everybody!

Have you heard the latest about Cardinal Burke?

I haven’t, and I’ve made it a point not to know what’s going on.

Why not? Because it’s not important to me. Me, as a layman with a job and a family and a personal conscience that keeps me busy enough all by itself. And if you were honest, you’d admit that it really isn’t important to you, either — not unless you work directly for Burke, or are his personal friend and will miss him when he moves to sunny Malta, the lucky son of a gun. It only seems important if you are addicted to following all the ins and outs of a 24-hour religious news cycle that has about as much to do with the Gospel as the schematics for the HVAC system at the Metropolitan Opera House has to do with music.

Read the rest at the Register.

I got nothin’, so we’re making muffins

Pumpkin muffins. This is our favorite, no-fail recipe: Downeast Maine Pumpkin Bread. Today we were short a few eggs, so we just mushed up a couple of bananas in their place. Sometimes I put demerara sugar on top, sometimes I add wheat germ, sometimes I add walnuts, almonds, or (to everyone’s chagrin) raisins, but mostly I just make the recipe as is — except I double it, which yields 24 muffins and two loaves. They are lovely and moist, and very good for adding to the kids’ lunches; and while, okay, they are essentially cake, pumpkin is a vegetable! It’s a vegetable.

Here is Benny from last week’s muffin adventure. She was saying, “Look at me, Mama! I greatest.”

Hard to argue with that. Give that girl some muffins!

PSA! Lazarus for Chrome will save your bacon

If you write, you will know that there is nothing more throw-uppy than losing everything you just wrote. I finally got around to installing Lazarus, a free extension for Google Chrome. (I believe you can use it for other browsers, too; I just always use Chrome.) Here’s the description:

Autosaves everything you type so you can easily recover from form-killing timeouts, crashes and network errors.

Ever had one of those “oh $*#@” moments when you’ve finally finished filling out a long form, and hit submit only to see an error message? And when you hit the back button, the form was blank… If so, you know you need Lazarus. And if not, you have a chance to install Lazarus before disaster strikes! Lazarus saves everything you type so if the worst happens you can recover the whole form by simply clicking a menu item. The data can be encrypted and is saved on your machine so you know it’s safe.

It downloaded in about thirty seconds and has already saved my bacon more than once. Recommended!

Is Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger worthy of the priesthood?

The great Elizabeth Scalia points out that prophets, like seminarians, tend to have something in common: they are mighty reluctant to take the job that heaven foists on them. They may certainly feel called, but they do not feel worthy — and they do not expect to slither comfortably into their vocations.

We start with our unworthiness, and we proceed to God’s mercy. That is the only path. There is no other path.

Read the rest at the Register.

There is no real choice in my state.

PIC local candidate with “flu shots cause autism” car

I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick and tired of telling these people, “Yes, please, this is what we want. No, thanks, I won’t insist on you even pretending to represent me in the most important issue in the world. I’ll vote for you because I always vote for you, because I always vote for you, and you know I always vote for you. Oh, I’m sorry, was this crucifix around my neck getting in your way? I’ll just twitch that to the side so you can twist the knife a little more easily.”

Can’t do it. Can’t do it one more time.

Read the rest at the Register.

My book sale phinds and phooeys

I used to try to make extra money selling used books online. I would go to library book sales and try to spot rare and unusual volumes that people would be willing to pay a fortune for. Using only my intuition, I paid $1 for a probable first edition of a biography of Charles de Gaulle, which I turned around and sold for $80. Wildly encouraged, I used that same intuition to buy another fifty or sixty likely-looking books, also for a dollar each. And every single one of them, nobody wants because nobody needs. Thus ended my bookseller’s career.

People do actually make money buying and selling used books online, but you have to really love every single thing about books – and, less romantically but more practically, you probably also need to have a handheld ISBN scanner, which will instantly tell you if you’ve found a rare gem or a turkey before you decide whether to buy it.

As with so many other things, the money value of a book is more about how rare it is than how good it is. And so people who sell books because they love reading may find themselves scooping up junk because they know it will turn a profit, which is kind of a heartbreaker.

Anyway, now we have the luxury of just buying books that we want to read ourselves. This time, we filled four shopping bags. Here’s what stands out this time around:

Book there were inexplicably three zillion copies of:

Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Really nicely written, overall. I have no idea how faithful it is to the actual biography of Vermeer, but it was a good, sad story, if a bit heavy handed at times. After reading it, I checked out the author’s earlier work, The Virgin Blue, and found it very much an earlier novel, and unbearably message-y. Should I keep reading, anyone? She’s done five more novels.

The Thorn Birds. This I read, I don’t know why. It is one of the worst novels I have ever encountered. If that one guy said, “I’m not a man, I’m a priest!” one more time, I was going to tear out the page and eat it in a rage. It’s so painful to read something by someone who clearly has talent, but who is overwhelmed, chapter after chapter, by fawning prejudice and a weakness for the easy way out. She opted for goo every time, until her characters were just little stubs of puppets struggling under a greasy load of caricature.

Stephen King everywhere. Holy mackerel, can we say overrated? I read several of his books in high school, and you know what he is? Competent. Hooray! Let us crown him with many crowns!

Book I put my foot down about this time: books that make noise. I long ago gave up the battle against toys that make noise, but I’m holding the line when it comes to books; and yes, five-year-old, that includes books whose batteries are dying and so they only make a small amount of noise.

The kids didn’t even ask for books that summarize Disney movies.

I also said no to a Care Bear puzzle that smelled like cats.

I did, however, green light a Harry Potter trivia game

which miraculously had all the pieces. They’ve played it at least five or six times, so it must be pretty good. Apparently it has a few inaccuracies, which only adds to the drama.

Things I buy every single time I see them:

The Family of Man (got two hardcover copies this time!)

Wrote about this wonderful collection of photographs and quotations here. I can’t pick it up without losing at least fifteen minutes. If you can find a clean copy, this would make a really nice wedding present. If you wanted to explain to an alien from Mars what human life is like, you could just show him this book.

Things I buy in hopes that I can leave them around the house and they will be so nice and bright that someone will learn something for once around here:

The Colour Library of Art: GOYA. 49 plates in full color? Yes please.

Byzantium: City of Gold, City of Faith by Paul Hetherington and Werner Forman. Gold! Candles! Mosaics! O Byzantium!

Replacement books that no one will be thrilled to see because we already have a few copies, but these ones have ALL THE PAGES:
Great Brain books. So weird and funny.

Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Actually, I haven’t found any kid who especially likes these books, but there are still plenty more kids, so I keep buying them.

Henry Huggins and other Beverly Cleary books. I am always on the lookout for Otis Spofford, Ellen Tebbits, and Emily’s Runaway Imagination. These aren’t as common as the Henry and Ramona and Beezus books, but they capture the puzzles and comforts of childhood just as honestly.

Homer Price books

Defiant purchase:

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

I like Toni Morrison, but I have less patience than I used to for books that just flit around here and there and make you figure out what happened when. I could also do without the recurring made-up phrases. You know who could get away with that? Homer. But “Baby Suggs, Holy,” is just not the same, and I do not need to hear it twenty-three times. But,I still like Toni Morrison, in small doses.

Trash books I considered buying just to remove them from circulation, but cheaped out because it wasn’t fill-a-bag day:

Dan Brown nonsense. I read The Da Vinci Code out of curiosity, and at first enjoyed it because of the astonishing things I was reading. I have worked with editors before, and I was just endlessly entertained trying to imagine who could actually do this for a living and yet let these passages see the light of day. But after a while, it just got depressing, and I ended up feeling like my brain had been worked over on some kind of exceedingly silly lathe.

Judy Blume nonsense. It’s recently come to my attention that Judy Blume has “written” “novels” for “adults.” I picked one up at the dump one time and read the first few pages.

It was like, “One day, the house wife was housewifing around, because her loutish and impotent husband forced to make sandwiches, which were made out of wheat bread, mayonnaise, turkey, and iceburg lettuce, which she preferred over romaine lettuce, even though she knew it was somewhat less nutritious. Then a mysterious stranger came by on a motorcycle and masturbated at her. THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED.” Geez louise. There oughta be a law.

And of course The Golden Compass, which I wrote about in Things that have no right to exist.

I took comfort from the fact that it was day two of the sale and there will still plenty of copies lying around, so maybe they will just send themselves to the garbage without any effort from me and my social conscience.

Take-a-chance books:

What It Feels Like to Be a Building

I haven’t read this one yet, but it looks like a neat concept. Here’s a review:

Have you ever felt squashed? Squeezed? Pulled? Tugged? If so, then you know what it feels like to be a building! Here, with playful drawings and humorous text, award-winning author Forrest Wilson uses human figures (plus some dogs and rams) to show that architecture and people have more in common than you might have believed. This book will delight everyone who is fascinated with the buildings around us.

SUPER SCORE:

CDs of The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce

For like $2 each! Foolproof plan: play these for the older kids at night while we fold laundry. This has got to be better than our current system, which is to never ever ever fold laundry.

The most-read book of the lot so far:

A Birthday for Frances

Pure pleasure.

Frances is probably the realest little kid in all of children’s literature. There is no more exquisite passage portraying the triumph of man’s higher nature over his own passions, than this short work depicting a young badger’s struggle to relinquish the Chompo bar that she bought for her undeserving little sister Gloria’s birthday party.

Guilt purchases:

None! Yay me! No “I really ought to finally read this,” “my kids ought to know this”, “we ought to have one of these around the house,” “it’s really time I learned how to quilt,” etc. I already stock my brain with stuff like that — no need to clog up the living room, too.

How about you? Any good book sale finds?

Oh, and as long as we’re talking about books, I forgot to take my ebook of sale, so you can still get The Sinner’s Guide to NFP ebook for $2.99! I’ll leave it up for another day, and then it will go back to full price.

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