Autism is a still poorly understood developmental disability that likely is neurological in origins. It is not caused by evil spirits,

Church members had wrapped the boy in sheets to keep him from scratching himself and others, but the boy was allowed to sit “any way that he feels comfortable,” Hemphill said.

“All I know is we’re not guilty of anything,” he said.

. . .

He said members of the church, made up of just six families, prayed for God to release the evil spirits that he said caused the boy’s illness. The church had been performing the prayer services for the boy three times a week for the past three weeks, Hemphill said.

“The boy just had a problem in his mind, and what we were doing was asking God to fix it,” Hemphill said. “He chose to fix it by taking him back home to Him.”

Source:

Cops Probe Death of Autistic Boy During Prayer Service. Associated Press, August 25, 2003.

I completely agree with this Arstechnica posting,

I’ve never sent out a virus email in my life, yet I’ve recieved dozens of email messages from well-meaning antivirus systems to tell me I have, simply because the systems take the forged From header as gospel. Indeed, for my own Inbox, the combination of these automated replies and bounces from defunct email addresses (also generated by the virus) has been much more of a nuisance than the virus itself!

Of course, the worst part of all of this is that these “secondary” messages are being sent out for all the right reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that these automated antivirus emails are only making the problem of email congestion worse.

I’m actually receiving more of these automated responses than I am actual instances of the virus.

I also absolutely despise it when people set auto replies to their personal e-mail accounts. Awhile ago I was copied on an e-mail that numerous people replied to and then replied to replies. The problem was that one of the recipients had gone on an extended leave of absence and left an automated message to that effect — which I think I received at least 50 times.

Here’s a hilarious take on the capture of Ali “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid in Iraq this week,

Coalition Troops Capture ‘Conventional Ali’

(2003-08-21) — The Iraqi general formerly known as ‘Chemical Ali’ was captured this morning by Coalition troops.

However, Ali Hassan al-Majid is now officially known as ‘Conventional Ali,’ since it is common knowledge that Iraq had no chemical weapons program.

“The thousands of Iraqis and Kurds who we thought were gassed on Al-Majid’s orders, must have died from breathing the smoke of conventional weapons or perhaps sand dust,” said an unnamed Pentagon spokesman. “But Conventional Ali will still be charged with misdemeanor violations of some environmental regulations about dust control at work sites.”

I don’t know much about organizing or pricing academic conferences, my wife is in charge of organizing a big-assed four day conference with thousands of attendees from around the world. She has some thoughts about BloggerCon’s pricing (her conference’s registration fee, by the way, comes in at less than $100 for four days).

I’ve always been a fan of Michael Fumento, even when I disagreed with him, so it’s extremely disappointing to see Fumento lose his cool in this fallacy-filled attack on bloggers and blogging.

Fumento has a legitimate complaint about a handful of bloggers, but choses to react with ad hominems and hasty generalizations about bloggers in general.

It’s interesting that he uses the exact same tactics against bloggers that people on the Left have tried to use against him over the years.

Fumento really has a blind spot when it comes to weight loss issues. His entire career, for example, has been spent pointing out that epidemiological studies that find very small increased risks aren’t all that reliable. But when it comes to weight gain, his book on the topic includes charts pushing claims of very small risk factors for being slightly above a person’s ideal BMI. A few years ago, Reason published my letter-to-the-editor making exactly this point,

Weighty Questions

Jacob Sullum’s review of Michael Fumento’s Fat of the Land and Richard Klein’s Eat Fat (“Fat Chances,” February) was disappointing since it didn’t address head on the dispute between Fumento and Klein over the evidence that obesity contributes to increased mortality. This is important because in his zeal to attack gluttony, Fumento appears to directly contradict previous claims he has made about the reliability of epidemiological studies to measure increased mortality.

In a 1995 op-ed piece, for example, Fumento refers to a study that found secondhand smoke was associated with a 19 percent increase in mortality and concludes, “At the time, many people including myself criticized the EPA report, saying [with] such a small apparently increased risk (so tiny, in fact, that the medical community has rejected much larger ratios as being conclusive on other potential carcinogens)…that the tiniest problem could throw the whole thing off.”

But now Fumento apparently accepts American Cancer Society claims that men 19 percent overweight have a 15 percent increased likelihood of death. What ever happened to the difficulty with “such a small apparently increased risk”?

Fumento also repeats the claim that 300,000 people die every year from obesity, but as Marcia Angell wrote in a recent New England Journal of Medicine editorial, “[A]lthough some claim that every year 300,000 deaths in the United States are caused by obesity, that figure is by no means well established. Not only is it derived from weak or incomplete data, but it is also called into question by the methodological difficulties of determining which of many factors contribute to premature death.”

As Steve Milloy of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition put it, the 300,000 figure is “classic junk science.” Apparently the limitations and difficulties of epidemiology, which Fumento discusses so well in his book Science Under Siege, are irrelevant when one strikes out on a crusade to save people from themselves.