What the lion and Lamb ministries has to say about it in their own words.
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v636396FNj3tTnQ

What the CDC has to say about it.

Studies have found the vaccine to be almost 100% effective in preventing diseases caused by the four HPV types covered by the vaccine– including precancers of the cervix, vulva and vagina, and genital warts. The vaccine has mainly been studied in young women who had not been exposed to any of the four HPV types in the vaccine.

The vaccine was less effective in young women who had already been exposed to one of the HPV types covered by the vaccine.

This vaccine does not treat existing HPV infections, genital warts, precancers or cancers.

How long does vaccine protection last? Will a booster shot be needed?
The length of vaccine protection (immunity) is usually not known when a vaccine is first introduced. So far, studies have followed women for five years and found that women are still protected. More research is being done to find out how long protection will last, and if a booster vaccine is needed years later.

What does the vaccine not protect against?
Because the vaccine does not protect against all types of HPV, it will not prevent all cases of cervical cancer or genital warts. About 30% of cervical cancers will not be prevented by the vaccine, so it will be important for women to continue getting screened for cervical cancer (regular Pap tests). Also, the vaccine does not prevent about 10% of genital warts—nor will it prevent other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). So it will still be important for sexually active adults to reduce exposure to HPV and other STIs.

Will girls/women be protected against HPV and related diseases, even if they don’t get all three doses?
It is not yet known how much protection girls/women would get from receiving only one or two doses of the vaccine. For this reason, it is very important that girls/women get all three doses of the vaccine.

The FDA has licensed the HPV vaccine as safe and effective. This vaccine has been tested in over 11,000 females (ages 9-26 years) around the world. These studies have shown no serious side effects. The most common side effect is soreness at the injection site. CDC, working with the FDA, will continue to monitor the safety of the vaccine after it is in general use.

So this is all I have to say. Why give a bad report about something so effective? I’m guessing but I’ll bet the religious get kind of mad about not being included in the research. They do not have even the barest of entry fees (education) to make a real contribution. Yet they never hesitate to offer up their opinion. Regardless of their information and or education about the matter.

They have placed themselves as defacto gatekeepers about what will and will not be sanctioned for their flocks use. Denial of this vaccine is going to cost them the entire next generation of their women who are bound to contract cancers at a higher rate.

This is the first in a long line (I hope ) of vaccines that will prevent cancers of all kinds. This prevents cervical cancer and some other HPV related diseases. We are only beginning and the religious will have none of it.

This then has to be the most ignorant thing I have seen. Why would anyone regardless of their affiliation deny any other person such life affirming medicine?

Once again science has proven that religion is ineffectual in solving much of any problem. Science has set out to conquer disease and is succeeding. Religion stands in the way.

Additional reading:
Papillomavirus Vaccine Could Reduce Rate Of Vulval And Vaginal Cancers
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070519133848.htm

And here:
CDC Questions and Answers concerning the Safety and Efficacy of Gardasil.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/hpv/downloads/vac-faqs-vacsafe-efficacy.pdf

Did any of you happen to catch yesterday’s Hardball with yet another debate between atheist Bush lover Christopher Hitchens and big-mouthed Al Sharpton? If not, below are three YouTube videos of the entire program.

I forced myself to sit and watch the entire thing and just took an extra blood pressure pill afterwards. Sharpton has serious diarrhea of the mouth. Hitchens, while I may not agree with him on his political stance, could at least express his point in an intelligent manner, whereas Mr. Media-Attention-Whore-Loud-Mouth barely let Hitchens have a word in edgewise much of the time. I particularly didn’t like Chris Matthews’ sarcastic comments aimed at Hitchens at the close of the program (not on the YouTube video, but I am trying to find it somewhere.)

Overall, for me, it was an extreme overdose of religion/anti-religion dialogue and anti-war from the fundie side, and right-wing politics and pro-war comments coming from the atheist side… very weird interview.

Part 1

6/28/07 Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton Hardball pt2
After a question from an audience member about Bush invading Iraq because God told him, in a typical god-botherer defense, Sharpton basically says that Bush was “misquided”…not misguided by his sky daddy. Typical sort of response we expect from imaginative Xians.

6/28/07 Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton Hardball pt3
I loved when Hitchens put the smack-down on “Jibberish boy” which the person recording this unfortunately cut out…it was quite awesome to see an atheist shut up a Xian on public television for once..

This is one of my favorite Simpson’s episodes. My favorite quote from this one: “We had a creation test and every answer was “God did it”

(To fully enjoy the image, click here. Absolutely NSFW! I repeat: NSFW viewing!)

Did you know that Tony Blair is converting to Catholicism? It’s been mentioned on the “webs-n-tubes” for the past week, but I paid no attention. Until I read this:

Andrew Grice, the political editor of The Independent is reporting that Blair has waited until leaving office to avoid possible legal issues:

Although Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister, the church has said there would be no constitutional bar to Mr Blair joining while he was still in office. But some lawyers believe the 1829 Emancipation Act, which granted civil rights to Roman Catholics, may still prevent a Catholic from becoming Prime Minister. It says that no Catholic adviser to the monarch can hold civil or military office.

Fast forward to this item at Crooks&Liars:

Apparently, Blair met with Pope Benedict on Saturday as his last official act of office and was given a “frank” dressing down by the anti-war Germanic Pope. The Vatican said there had been a ‘frank exchange of views.‘ If Tony Blair was looking towards the Pontiff and the Catholic Church for the absolution of his sins regarding the Iraq War, he was not to find it in Vatican City. Blair, trying to put some spiritual distance between himself and his policies, had no such luck. Not unlike Michael Corleone in Godfather III, Blair ‘keeps trying to get out and they keep pulling him back in’.

Vatican sources said the Pope was unmoved in his view that Blair had been wrong over Iraq. Ouch! Don’t worry, there’s still time and a few religions left. Can anyone say “circumcision?”

WTF? Catholics in England have a lot in common with atheists in the US? Wow!

No[ah] Tanks! in debut of “Evan Almighty”

Hollywood’s most expensive comedy EVER needed divine intervention and didn’t get it at the box office this weekend as Universal’s Evan Almighty debuted to a disappointing $32.1 million…The Tom Shadyac-directed pic will see at most $100 mil domestic this summer despite its runaway cost of $210 mil. (Universal insists the final budget came in at $175 mil.)The pic’s business was strongest in the South and Mid-West, average in the West Coast and Mountain regions, and softest in the East and Canada. But the studio had marketed the movie’s religious theme heavily to faith-based sectors whose crowds never translated into multitudes of moviegoers…”Suffice to say without ‘frequent church attenders, this film might have gone down as one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history,” an insider who helped market the film explained to me. All along, tracking scores for “Unaided Awareness” had been too low. And even with the book and toilet jokes removed, parents didn’t want to take their kids to a sequel based on a movie they felt was too mature…

But the major problem in the end seemed to be that Evan Almighty sacrificed too many laughs at the altar of heartwarming. Exit polls showed that the top reason adults wanted to see the movie was the humor (76%). But Evan’s reviews were god awful. According to RottenTomatoes.com, it garnered only 21% positive reviews among the pool of 112 film critics, and only 9% from major media outlets.). For details about what went wrong, including an analysis of the movie’s marketing and a meltdown by the director, read my previous: ‘Evan Almighty’: Going To Heaven Or Hell?.

It doesn’t look this Gord-based story-cum-stinker will do any better outside the US. It opened to so-so numbers in Russian and Ukraine, and debuts in the UK, France and Germany in July and August. Awww…

Nikki Finke has this to say in the last link above:

…Universal moguls have convinced themselves that religious America will turn out for this family fun in droves. I’m not so sure, and I may look like an idiot at the end of the summer by saying so. Even though the studio is dragging out every trick in the Christian playbook, including that PR firm to the religious Grace Hill Media, to convince holy-rollers in fly-over country to see this take-off on the already tired Noah’s Ark tale. I suspect The Passion Of The Christ crowd wants stories based on the New Testament than the Old Testament. Leave it to heathen Hollywood not to comprehend that…

I agree with Finke – and will go farther: America doesn’t really want movies made by or for xians. (The only ones who believe their own lies are the RaptureRightist theocons.) Xians have compartmentalized their lives: Sunday morning is for being dutifully observant; the rest of the week has been paid for up front. Actually, their taste in children’s fare really runs to Pixar’s fairy tales and animated comedies with “cute” themes. Whether or not that translates into licensed product tie-ins or that movie studios have found the heart of “cuteness” and pimp it hard – it makes a great way to keep children busy with their latest “crush” on their sheets, Tshirts, dolls and lunchboxes. The kids love the latest fish/car/penquin/lion/native-princess/mermaid/ogre – they don’t love the Armor of Gawd jammies, no matter what the adults tell us!

Meanwhile, the xian parents are too busy with NASCAR and American Idol to care or to be drawn in to Hollywood’s latest Noah nyuck-nyuck-nyuck fest. And as much as I like Morgan Freeman (and the late George Burns, from Oh! God!), Gord loses too much in being translated to the big screen. Perhaps the fundies unconciously realize that. Or find BigScreenGord “distasteful” or unfunny…

And I think we’ve seen the last of the “Passion of the Kreist” torture-porn. I believe that most Americans woke up soon afterward and asked themselves, “What the hell was that all about?”

IF I ever decide I need to see Steve Carrell in a religious setting, I’ll rent the DVD. But I really don’t think it will ridicule the OT or Gord or Noah enough to be worth my time.

Rhetorical question of the day: How many heads would explode if a Hollywood movie was made with a powerful atheist story line?

(Click on the picture for a larger image)

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a new job, and am in the process of the good old 90 day probationary period. As such, I have to decidedly scale back my usually loud and aggressive personality (not to the point of mumbling to myself, I might add: lately, I’ve been making an effort to balance my ‘militancy’ with diplomacy).

And so, I have an anecdotal tale to tell, which set the gears in my thick Irish skull a-turnin’.

I step out occasionally for a ciggie break, and occasionally I chat with this nice lady (who, incidentally, is a preacher’s daughter).

We began discussing how politicians are inherent untrustworthy, and I pointed out to her that there’s a distinct difference between flip-flopping and a politician changing his/her mind based on evidence. (I cited Bill Simon as an example, as I recall reading that he’d changed his mind on abortion, but cannot find a citation, and a Jon Carroll column that I read some years back, where he made a good argument that a politician can change his/her mind, if there’s reasonable evidence to the contrary. Again, cannot find).

I brought up the recent Republican debate, where three of the runners didn’t ‘believe’ in evolution – and of course, this opened a bit of a can of worms.

She kept emphasizing that it was important that she knew what a politician believed – I pointed out that evolution is the backbone of biology, is a science, etc.

Time for a flummox moment:

I was told that it didn’t matter – it was what the person believed was important. I was also treated to the old ’Where’s the spirituality? Either we came from Adam and Eve, or we just sprang up from animals” canard. I also heard about how scientists can’t agree on any set theory (I very patiently pointed out that there are theistic evolutionists, such as Ken Miller, Francis Collins, etc), but she was having none of it.

I also (quite diplomatically) told her that while these ’scientists’ (I love how no name-dropping is ever involved in these personal discussions, in re: the theist) disagree on the details/approach, they’re in general agreement on the overall picture.

I was told if I wanted to believe that, that was fine. I began to point out that science isn’t about belief, that it was based on facts and evidence, that science was about catalogued observations, at which point some fellow joined in on her side with some utterly vacuous platitudes about believing (which sounds fine and good if you’re an overly tolerant lamb), at which juncture, I bit my tongue and walked away.

I’ll just wait until the 90 days are up to rejoin that conversation, you betcha.

She’s a nice lady. I rather like talking to her. Like myself, she’s a sunny, happy person. Obviously, she’s not completely daft – her job is quite a bit more complex than mine.

On the flip side, I go to lunch with the computer ‘nerds’ – one young fellow (I’m old enough to be his dad – no joke) is also an atheist. We struck up a conversation about thermodynamics and quantum physics, and thus, I’ve been dubbed ‘Doug the Physicist’ (utterly hysterical, as I’ve no college background whatsoever). He stated at one point, that being logical, he can’t accept religion – it’s either logical or not. Not? Gone.

In my roundabout way here, I’m somewhat indulging in what I would’ve liked to say – which is this:

Belief is not enough. It is not an explanation. It is not a shield. It is by no means a badge of honor, whether it is treated as such by the majority or not. It is an eccentricity, and should be treated as such.

You cannot tailor the facts to fit your worldview. Rather, you have to tailor your worldview accordingly.

When a child tells a wild fable, replete with magical creatures and wizardly feats, we laugh, pat said child on the head, and nod in agreement. After all, they’re children: likelihood is, that someday they’ll outgrow these wild extravagancies, or perhaps ply them as a trade, such as a fantasy/sci-fi/horror writer.

But if adults base their decisions on some obscure anachronistic piece of writing, indeed, not only their worldview, but all their decisions – politics, discrimination, if they feel the need to play mathematical games to extract an answer (rather than use their own noggins) or to randomly pick some verse from their wholly bibble, I’d have to say that the whole 10 percent of the brain being used myth may have some merit after all.

The day has passed, humanity’s adolescence is long gone, the time for adulthood is far overdue.

Fantasies are a fine pastime for idle moments, but are unfit for that short time we have allotted to us on this planet. This cloak of flesh is all there is: best to use it wisely, live fully, for reality is a handful enough.

This is the Apostate, signing off.

A CBS-affiliate site in North Dakota features a post that originated at the aptly named sayanything blog, which is part of the Pajamas Media family of factually challenged web holes.

Self-described atheist Rob writes about the following lawsuit in North Dakota, brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation:

The foundation, a group of atheists and agnostics, argues that the state’s Division of Juvenile Services and the Ward County Social Services Department should stop committing children with behavioral and emotional problems to the Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch, which, according to the ranch’s Web site, helps “children and families succeed in the name of Christ.” The ranch — actually an association that provides a variety of residential and day programs around the state — and directors of the two government agencies are named as defendants.

The complaint says that “children are disciplined for refusing to participate in the spiritual aspects” of their therapy and that objectionable behavior is deemed a “corruption in the eyes of Jesus Christ.”

“This is much more troubling than other cases,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, “because it is a captive audience and a vulnerable population that is unabashedly being indoctrinated in Christianity. They are being committed by the county or the state without their consent.”

So, the state requires that children knuckle under to religious brainwashing. There’s a word for that, what is it… oh, yeah: “The Taliban.”

And how does this rub ol’ Rob?

The name of the group, Freedom From Religion, is more than a little obnoxious. The constitution guarantees the freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Far too many people, including these busybody atheist groups who don’t seem to have anything better to do with their time than get the vapors over even the smallest hint of religion in government, misunderstand this. As long as, in any given issue, the government is not a) establishing a religion or favoring one over the others or b) preventing the free practice of religion by citizens there is nothing unconstitutional about religion in government.

If the state wants to contract with a religious outfit as an option for helping troubled teens that’s perfectly acceptable.

Yes, it’s the people who don’t want forcible religious indoctrination that are the busybodies, what with their obnoxious desire for freedom of belief.

He then momentarily acknowledges “a bit of merit” to the suit before immediately negating that concern.

I’m not familiar enough with with out juvenile justice system to know for sure, but I believe the Boys Ranch may be one of the only options courts/social workers have for helping troubled teens. And if that’s true, the state needs to find a second outfit to provide secular care. Because while religion isn’t necessarily a bad thing (even this atheist sees some benefits to spiritual teachings, even if only for the moral and ethics lessons), teens going through the juvenile justice process should have a secular alternative available. Because like it or not, not everyone in our population is Christian, or even religious.

Perhaps there is a secular alternative to the Dakota Boy’s Ranch here in the state (or maybe the Boy’s Ranch is capable of providing a secular program), and if that’s true I doubt this lawsuit has any merit.

In the same spirit, so to speak, then it’s OK if the state doles out forced indoctrination of Islam, Scientology, Zeusology, or Satanism, as long as there’s one secular facility somewhere.

A scan down the other stories currently on the makeupshit blog home page finds a treasure trove of truthiness, for example:

• Continued flogging of the “Nancy Pelosi is a traitor for visiting Syria” canard, somehow neglecting the fact that her visit was preceded and followed by similar visits by Republican reps who — of course — are and forever will remain America’s heroes
• A claim that a group that wants to preserve the separation of church and state is hypocritical for seeking federal money to help uphold the constitution, as if freedom from religion (oops, sorry to use that obnoxious phrase) is a form of theism
• An argument that “the Democrats have opened themselves up for a world of hurt by getting in bed with the Michael Moore anti-war types. These people are simply out of the mainstream of American politics.” Well, he’s right, as long as “mainstream” means the 26% of Americans who support the war.

There’s much more there for the scatologist to muck through, but after a while it just starts making you feel dirty, and not in a good way.

Reaction from our ally Pakistan on the news of Salman Rushdie’s impending knighthood:

Today, Pakistan’s religious affairs minister suggested that the knighthood was so grave an offence that any Muslim anywhere in the world would be justified in taking violent action.

“If somebody has to attack by strapping bombs to his body to protect the honour of the Prophet then it is justified,” Mr ul-Haq told the National Assembly.

The minister, the son of Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who died in a plane crash in 1988, later retracted his statement in parliament, then told the AFP news agency that he meant to say that knighting Rushdie would foster extremism.

Muslim clerics in the Asian nation took a page from “The Blue Ribbon Puppies” and your local youth soccer league, where everyone gets a nice little award, no matter what they do. Thus, they’re giving an honorary title to mass-murderer Osama Bin Laden:

“If a blasphemer can be given the title ‘Sir’ by the West despite the fact he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah,” the chairman, Tahir Ashrafi, told Reuters.

I guess Hot Chocolate was right: “Every 1’s a Winner.”