BAD Science Debunked: Abortion Does NOT Cause Breast Cancer

Back in early December, when Babs Kay hitched her anti-feminism agenda again to yet another BAD (biased, agenda-driven) study purporting to link abortion and breast cancer again, DJ! took her on.

Joyce Arthur of Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada weighed in on the comments, promising a fuller analysis of the study.

Here it is. It is excellent.

The anti-choice movement has been making a lot of noise over a new study out of China, published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control, that purports to show a 44 percent increase in breast cancer risk for women who have had an abortion, with the risk increasing after each subsequent abortion. The study claims this may help explain the “alarming” rise in breast cancer in China over the past 20 years, which parallels the one-child policy introduced in 1979.

She proceeds to demolish its methodology, explaining the various kinds of known biases associated with this sort of study, including recall bias. Simply put, recall bias occurs when the two groups (the "cases," women who have or have had breast cancer, vs. the "controls", women who haven't) recall their medical histories differently. The "cases" are more likely to offer full details, while the "controls" may downplay their own abortion history. The problem is exacerbated by the level of abortion stigma associated in a culture.

She highlights this doozie.

Anti-choice activist Dr. Joel Brind has been promoting the ABC [abortion/breast cancer] association for over two decades. He claims that the Chinese study “neutralized” the recall bias argument. But Brind missed—or chose not to mention—that the journal article contained a confusing error, one that helped to hide the study’s own recall bias shortcomings. Early on, the study authors say:

The lack of a social stigma associated with induced abortion in China may limit the amount of underreporting.

But later in the study, the authors say:

[T]he self-reported number of IA [induced abortions] will probably be underestimated, as the stigma of abortion still exists in China, especially when a woman has more than two IAs. Therefore, this underestimation will inevitably create spurious associations between IA and breast cancer, especially for more IAs.

These two contradictory statements should never have gotten past the peer reviewers.

There are other fatal methodological flaws in the study and Joyce's article also links to other interesting work over the years and from several countries with widely differing abortion and breast cancer rates and attitudes towards abortion.

In short, many researchers have looked into the ABC link and it simply does not bear up under scrutiny.

As I've said many times before, this kind of bullshit needs to be called out every time it appears. It is unconscionable and irresponsible to appear to be using objective science to, as Joyce says, "to reinforce abortion stigma and frighten women."

And, of course, it's laughably hypocritical for fetus fetishists to wring their hands in pious concern for the well-being of women who have abortions when in other contexts, they delight in calling us "sluts" and "baby murderers".

So, while splendid analyses like this will change no anti minds, it should reassure women who have had or are contemplating having an abortion.

ABORTION DOES NOT CAUSE BREAST CANCER.

Challenge for ORF: Protect Tibetan Buddhism

DAMMIT JANET! has a project for the new Office of Religious Pandering Freedom.

Speak up about assaults on Tibetans from guerrilla Xian missionaries.

Tibet is the K2 of the evangelical Christian world – missionaries see it as a formidable yet crucial undertaking, a last spiritual frontier. Of the 400 foreigners living in Xining, most are missionaries, estimates Chris [pseudonym for missionary interviewed].

Proselytising has been illegal in China since 1949, when Mao Zedong declared western missionaries "spiritual aggressors" and deported them en masse, so today's evangelists work undercover as students, teachers, doctors, and business owners. Moreover, Tibetans are tough customers in the market for souls – Buddhism is central to their cultural identity, making them notoriously difficult to convert.

While Tibetans might be a tough sell, Chinese authorities are not so much.

More than 10 people interviewed for this article said that Chinese authorities in Tibetan areas were selectively tolerant of missionaries for reasons that range from pragmatic to borderline sinister. One is that they are a boon to local economies – they open lucrative businesses and teach at local schools for next to nothing, supplementing their meagre salaries with donations from home. Authorities may also consider missionaries politically trustworthy, reluctant to undermine their spiritual missions by openly criticising regional policies.

And lastly, the government may welcome them as a powerful counterforce to Tibetan Buddhism, with its electrifying political overtones.

"China isn't trying to destroy religion by any means, but they're trying to destroy certain parts of Tibetan religion," said [Robbie Barnett, a leading Tibet expert at Columbia University]. "They're not the same project by any means, but they certainly have some congruency."

Makes sense. China is deploying religious homeopathy against Tibetan Buddhism.

Why is Tibet such a big deal to Xians?

Most missionaries in Tibet belong to nondenominational organisations which believe that Jesus Christ will return to the earth only when people from every social, cultural and linguistic group have been exposed to his teachings. These groups view mass conversion as a high form of ecclesiastical service, and as such, their tactics can be covert and transactional. Some lure young Tibetans with the promise of English lessons or professional training and coax them into conversion after making sure of their loyalty. Various Tibetans in Xining expressed disgust with this tactic. One likened it to bribery.

And Tibet has been the holy grail for quite a while, using similar 'covert transactions'.

The first missionary to make any significant headway in Tibet was a Portuguese Jesuit named António de Andrade who, in 1624, infiltrated the region disguised as a Hindu pilgrim.

Faced by both China's selective tolerance and Tibetans' disgust, the zealots get creative.

Missionaries have adopted a range of tactics to combat these obstacles, but none have proven consistently successful. In the 1990s, many would distribute religious leaflets in predominantly Buddhist areas. Evangelical blogs describe the process: often by cover of night, "tract-bombing" teams on tourist visas would stuff the leaflets into letterboxes and nail them to monastery walls. These missions tended to invite more hostility than curiosity. Missionaries were often arrested by high-strung officials or chased away by monks.

Here's an excerpt from the tract-bombing blog.

I dropped in at this one Hui (muslim) restaurant to get something to eat.  I asked for noodles (which is a staple among the muslims) expecting to get the usual bowl of broth filled with noodles and spices.  Instead I received a plate of weird looking thick noodles topped with sponges.  Yes, sponges.  They looked like sponges and tasted like sponges (unfortunately I do know what sponges taste like).  The only difference was that they did not chew like sponges.  I have no idea what it was but it wasn’t that great.  After forcing down most of it so that I would not offend the cook I asked for a bag to bring the rest with me and left.  It is an interesting experience going out to eat in a land where you don’t know what they are saying or how to order what you want.  Try it sometime.  Broadens your perspectives greatly.

This is the sort of sophisticate sent to convert the heathens. (And why, pray tell, does this guy know what sponges taste like?)

Here's the challenge. Will the Office of Religious Freedom protest the use of lying, sneaking Xian evangelicals by China in its campaign to eradicate Tibetan Buddhism?

Surely Tibetans' freedom of religion matters too?

Image source. (Get used to seeing it, dear readers.)

Anti-Choice Tag Team

Thar's gold in them thar uteri.

Keeping the abortion debate alive is very lucrative for a number of anti-choice entrepreneurs. Churches and 'right to life' groups are only the most obvious.

There are the born-again anti-choicers like Abby Johnson, who once were blind but now they see.

There are the 'Conceived in Rape' mongers, like Rebecca Kiessling.

And now, a new-to-me brand of huckster -- the faux women's rights defenders.

Via Kady O'Malley, we learn that sex-selective abortion promoter opponent Mark Warawa had a bunfest planned for Thursday, aka The Day Senator Brawler Brazeau Blew up the Internet.

Meanwhile, outside the Chamber, Conservative MP Mark Warawa will kick off his campaign to build support for his bid to condemn sex-selective terminations -- which, it's worth noting, is due to be added to the private members' priority list in early March -- by arranging a press conference for Reggie Littlejohn, who is, according to the advisory, a "leading expert" on China's One Child Policy.

According to the notice, Littlejohn will 'call on Canadian leaders to condemn ... gendercide," which is, of course, precisely what the Warawa motion would do.

Tonda MacCharles tweeted a bit about it, so it did occur, but it got no other coverage.

Reggie Littlejohn hath an organization called Women's Rights Without Frontiers, which claims to be a coalition dedicated to SHRIEEKING about forced abortion in China.

Under 'Team', Littlejohn herself is listed along with a board of directors, including couple of organizations like this one, concerned with 'Serving persecuted Christians worldwide'.

OK then, forced abortion and persecuted Christians go together well, I guess.

But is Littlejohn anti-choice? You betcha. She was recently awarded the 'National Pro-Life Recognition Award at the National Prayer Service preceding the Annual March for Life'.

From her acceptance speech:

My question is, where is the pro-choice movement on this?  Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, no one supports forced abortion because it is not a choice.  Why isn’t the pro-choice movement condemning forced abortion in China? Why aren’t they standing against forced sterilization? Why aren’t they crying out against the selective abortion of baby girls? Right now, as I am speaking to you, women are being dragged out of their homes, strapped down to tables, and forcibly aborted and sterilized. I challenge these organizations to take a stand.

Woo. That glurge oughta open some wallets, eh?

Wait. There's more.

Also on Thursday, I ran across a press release announcing that someone named Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute would address some Kansas (where else?) legislators on sex-selective abortion.

PRI describes itself as: 'an international non-profit which works to end coercive population control, and fight the myth of overpopulation which fuels it.'

Mosher seems to do quite nicely out of the venture.

The President of PRI, Steven W. Mosher, received in 2005 the equivalent of ~13% of the entire expenses budget for the organization and roughly equivalent to the entire administrative expenses budget for 2005.

And he's 'controversial'.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Mosher successfully lobbied the George W. Bush administration to withhold $34 to $40 million per year for seven years from the U.N. Population Fund, the largest international donor to family planning programs.

So, Mosher works to withhold contraception while Littlejohn squeals about the results. Works good.

I'm betting the next time Warawa organizes a bunfest on M408, Mosher will be the guest.

You can CON some of the people...

The federal government's public health and safety programs that Harper and his Reformatory thugs have been ravaging since he came to power, have been deeply cut.

Remember how Agriculture Minister Ritz made jokes about listeriosis deaths?

Which may explain why this toxic coffee-maker, a cheap copy of an Italian product, is being recalled 6 years after being released on the Canadian market.

Note that it's the Bialotti Coffee Maker (and not the Bialetti brand) that puts lead into your cup of espresso.














The knock-offs are manufactured by National Aero-Technology - Hangzhou, China.

Could it be the same company that made those counterfeit electronic chips that were installed in National Defence's new Hercules military transport planes?

Follow the money!

Where are the cops forensic accountants when we need them?

As a quick-eyed reader points out here, if the privately-held Canadian companies whose executives accompanied Harper on his Panda-hugging Tour de Chine  photo op last year did reimburse the government (as many claim they did), where did our money go?
Some of those companies, including gold company Eldorado Gold Corp., said they insisted on paying their own way throughout the trip and are surprised to hear they appear on a government expense list.

“Our CEO Paul Wright paid ALL his expenses (meals, cab fares, accommodations and any other expenses) incurred on the trip,” Nancy Woo, vice-president of investor relations, wrote in an email.

“We, too, would find it an unreasonable expense for the taxpayer.”

Financial giant Manulife said it was their corporate policy to reimburse the government for any major expenses incurred by its executives, and is addressing the matter.

Whose deep, deep CON pockets did those thousands of dollars surreptiously slip into?

No wonder PMSHithead and his corrupt band of cheaters, liars, fraudsters and thieves are in no hurry to staff the position of Parliamentary Budget Officer.

CON hogs at the trough!

It comes as no surprise that the Harper government is dispensing corporate welfare, in generous acts of CON cronyism, with taxpayers' money.  

If there's money to be made by accompanying PMSHithead to China, shouldn't these profitable private companies PAY their own way and cover their own business expenses?

The Conservative government covered expenses for some of the country’s top executives as they accompanied the prime minister around China a year ago, a move business leaders and officials defend as a good investment.

The trip signalled a change of approach for Stephen Harper, who for years eschewed the idea of leading big trade offensives abroad.

Then came the China trip last February.

The delegation to three Chinese cities included 30 executives from major oil, agricultural and manufacturing companies as well as roughly two dozen members of the Chinese-Canadian cultural community.

Compare that with a 2009 trip to China — Harper’s first — when he brought along eight people, including Laureen, his stylist and four Chinese-Canadian businesspeople.

The Foreign Affairs Department says local transportation, accommodation, meals and “miscellaneous expenses” incurred by an official delegation is covered by the government. For the 2012 non-governmental participants, that meant an average of $1,200 a person.

Corporations and associations — including Bombardier, Cenovus Nuclear Energy, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Cameco — confirmed that the government paid for portions of the expenses, with the amount varying from firm to firm.

From here.

Last word to Stephen Lautens who brought this story to our attention.

"What's a Harper photo-op without a paid entourage?"

Hence the photo at the top of this blogpost.

Is Chen Guangcheng 'Pro-Life'?

When DJ! wrote about Chen Guangcheng, he was largely unknown beyond fetus fetishists and China-watchers.

Now he's the subject of some delicate negotiations between the US and China.

But is he really 'pro-life' as we in the blighted New Republic of Gilead understand it?

According to Lindsay Beyerstein, nope.

Anti-abortion news and opinion websites have taken to calling Chen a “pro-life dissident,” which is fundamentally misleading. Chen is not opposed to abortion, per se, he is opposed to forced abortion. Though he’s been described as an opponent of the One Child policy, he hasn’t campaigned to overturn the law. In fact, unlike most Chinese dissidents, Chen’s target is not the central government; he wants to enlist Beijing’s help to enforce the law of the land and to check the power of local government officials who have terrorized him and the women of his community for years.

“I think it's important to note that he's not anti-abortion per se,” wrote Jin Zhao, a freelance journalist who blogs at Things You Don’t Know About China. “He is critical of the local authorities' forced abortions which he believes to have violated women's rights.”

That seems straightforward enough, doesn't it?

Nope. The lying liars are continuing to bleat about 'pro-abort' Clinton and Obama not helping the heroic baby-saver with the complicity of the 'liberal press' in what Beyerstein calls 'the pro-life spin cycle' and 'the perfect dog whistle'.

Where, oh where are the feminists?????

Right here.

The anti-abortion movement isn’t alone in its admiration for Chen. In a post on Feministing, one of the most influential feminist blogs on the web, Lori Adelman argued for a more precise label: “More apt than the whitewashed ‘human rights activist’ label he’s been given in the news is ‘reproductive rights activist’ and perhaps even ‘feminist.’”

Chen Guangcheng

From the Pre-empting the Where Are the Feminists? Bleat File:

Have you heard of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng?

Probably not, unless you are a fetus fetishist or follower of China-US relations.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton no doubt hopes the diplomatically delicate case of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who escaped house arrest and then sought refuge with US authorities in Beijing, can be resolved before she and a high-level entourage including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrive in the Chinese capital Thursday.

Both American and Chinese officials are tight-lipped on their deliberations over the rights advocate, whose treatment has figured prominently in official Western protests of China’s human rights record. Mr. Chen, blind since childhood, is a self-taught legal authority and critic of the forced abortions he exposed through risky investigations.

At the White House on Monday, President Obama said during a press conference that he was "aware" of the Chen case but would not say how the US will treat Chen's case. He suggested, however, that the issue of human rights in China would come up in this week's talks, as it always does with Beijing, not only because "it is the right thing to do" but also because "we think China will be stronger as it opens up and liberalizes its own system."

The Fetus Lobby is spinning this sticky wicket as 'pro-abort Obama won't protect heroic baby-saver!!1!!1'

*sigh*

Nothing yet on Where Are the Feminists on the Persecution of Chen Guangcheng???!!??

For the record: Feminists are as opposed to forced abortion as we are to forced birth.

But unlike the zygote zealots, we recognize a diplomatic mine-field when we see one.


Image source and more about famous Chinese dissidents

UPDATE (May 2, 2012): Ah, there they are. SHRIIEEEK!!!!1!1

Caption Contest launched by CC

As proposed by Canadian Cynic, find a suitable caption for the photo op above.

Mine?

Laureen: "Why do I always get stuck wrangling the animal in a photo? I told the PMO after the fake liplock in Niagara Falls that they don't pay me enough for this kind of humiliation."

ADDED: link to CC's tweet and a clever contest entry.

On Those 'Missing Girls'

Joe Biden has stepped in it. Again. (What a dork that guy is.)

Under fire from angry Republicans, US Vice President Joe Biden's office has said that he firmly opposes "repugnant" Chinese population control practices like "forced abortion and sterilization."

"The Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China's coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization," Biden spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told AFP by email.

"The vice president believes such practices are repugnant," she said after Republican White House candidates blasted Biden for recent comments he made about Beijing's "one-child" population control policy during a visit to China.

Biden told an audience at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, Sunday that "your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family."

(Go to the link to read the hyperventilations of the ReThugs.)

Fetus fetishists were already stoked about one of their perennial faves because a couple of months ago a book by Mara Hvistendahl called 'Unnatural Selection' was published. Which got further ramped up by the release of census stats from India.

In the world's largest democracy a massive crisis of missing girls is unfolding, according to India's 2011 census. The latest census shows that the gap between the number of girls per 1,000 boys up to the age of six has widened to 914, a decrease from 927 a decade ago, at the 2001 census.

With the SHRIEEEEKfest came, of course, the mandatory 'Where are the feminists?!!?' jab lament. Because, you see, we feminists should be outraged because half of all abortions are done on 'pre-born women' (that's their phrase), and with sex-selective abortion, 'pre-born women' are actively targeted. Their (idiotic) question is: 'If you claim to be about women's rights, what about pre-born women's rights?'

Sigh. So I thought about writing about it. We at DJ! have taken on the subject at least twice. Once when wingnuts in BC proposed that if the gender of a fetus is known through an ultrasound, the results should not be revealed. (You know, to put an end to that rampant Canadian practice of sex-selective abortion.) And once when Ujjal Dosanjh stepped in it from the reverse direction as Biden. First, he was against sex-selective abortion, then he hadda walk it back by adding: 'But I am totally absolutely pro-choice'.

DJ! argued and argues that this is not a problem in Canada. The communities that prefer boys to girls are small, and besides, they'll get their comeuppance when their sons can't find partners of the 'right' sort and maybe bring home sweeties of the 'wrong' sort. Or 'wrong' gender. Or both. *evilgrin*

But, yes. Sex-selective abortion has created a ginormous problem in the benighted countries where it is practised.

I was going to argue this time that back in the 1960s overpopulation was the big bugaboo. We hadn't yet realized that that was too simplistic. It's not sheer overpopulation, we now know, it's overconsumption plus growing population that's going to kill the planet.

But that's when China and India began to try to grapple with their poverty problems by trying to slow population growth. China, because it could, instituted the infamous One Child Policy. India, being a democracy, couldn't be quite so draconian and tried kinder, more innovative policies.

Besides, both countries were fucking sick of being poor.

And I was going to argue that the best way to lower population growth is to promote women's rights and in particular to educate women.

Ultimately, though, this shouldn't be seen as a medical dilemma, but as a social one. The way to prevent sex-selective abortion isn't to legislate against it or attack the women who seek it – it's to create cultural changes that transform the place of women. By offering girls education, training and opportunities for employment, femicidal traditions can be uprooted, and a world that values women and fully recognises their right to exist created instead. To get there, though, we must first accept that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, on their own terms. Because if no one gives them autonomy in their own skin, why should they believe that their potential daughters deserve it either?

Aside: I really liked one of the comments there by hillbillyzombie:

Q: In what language is religion an anagram of misogyny?
A: All of them.

What Joe Biden stepped in is the relatively new contention that the developed West promoted the practice in China and India.

Much of the literature on sex selection has suggested that cultural patterns explain the phenomenon. But Hvistendahl lays the blame squarely on western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences. Amniocentesis and ultrasound scans have had largely positive applications in the west, where they have been used to detect foetal abnormalities. But exported to Asia and eastern Europe they have been intricately linked to an explosion of sex selection and a mushrooming of female abortions.

Hvistendahl claims western governments actively promoted abortion and sex selection in the developing world, encouraging the liberalisation of abortion laws and subsidising sales of ultrasounds as a form of population control.

"It took millions of dollars in funding from US organisations for sex determination and abortion to catch on in the developing world," she writes."

Roll out that whole 'feminist secularist Culture of Death' meme thingy!!!!!!

But again, it's a bit more subtle than your average fetus fetishist can cope with.

While it's true that the West did promote contraception and abortion, the purpose was ^NOT women's rights but population control. If they'd promoted women's rights with the same enthusiasm and money way back then, perhaps the problem of devalued and now missing women wouldn't have happened.

No one combating sex selection in China or India now argues that the appropriate reaction to decades of violating women's rights is to swing in the other direction and violate them further. Just as a woman should not be forced to abort a wanted pregnancy, she should not be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

Yet more subtlety. Yes, it's a cultural thing, but more than that it's a 'rising expectations' thing.

In the mid-1970s, amniocentesis, which reveals the sex of a baby in utero, became available in developing countries. Originally meant to test for fetal abnormalities, by the 1980s it was known as the "sex test" in India and other places where parents put a premium on sons. When amnio was replaced by the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, it meant that most couples who wanted a baby boy could know ahead of time if they were going to have one and, if they were not, do something about it. "Better 500 rupees now than 5,000 later," reads one ad put out by an Indian clinic, a reference to the price of a sex test versus the cost of a dowry.

But oddly enough, Ms. Hvistendahl notes, it is usually a country's rich, not its poor, who lead the way in choosing against girls. "Sex selection typically starts with the urban, well-educated stratum of society," she writes. "Elites are the first to gain access to a new technology, whether MRI scanners, smart phones—or ultrasound machines." The behavior of elites then filters down until it becomes part of the broader culture. Even more unexpectedly, the decision to abort baby girls is usually made by women—either by the mother or, sometimes, the mother-in-law.

They don't want girls, yes. But more than that they want to live like us in the West. Simply put: girls cost money, boys make money. (And just as importantly, operating an ultrasound clinic is a nice little earner too.)

Yes, the developed West deserves some blame for the missing girls. But it is the capitalist West and its values that provided the technology and the profit for its operators that deserves the much bigger blame.

Feminism is not to blame for this. If feminists had been in charge of the Club of Rome, I daresay the outcome would have been quite different.

Commenter Ngoho at the MoJo link sums it up nicely.

It's possible that, since men steered culture into valuing their sex above females, perhaps a generation of lonely men will change that culture into one which values women.

Payback is a bitch, isn't she?

Short Learning Curve

Last week DAMMIT JANET! raised a number of questions about Stevie Spiteful's "low-key" performance at the UN Copenhagen climate change conference.

We learn from C. C. - About that whole "fascist" label ... how his bullies handled the spoof government website, after a prank press release highlighted the do-nothing, say-nothing strategy on climate change adopted by the ReformaTories.

Does it come as a surprise to anyone that this Conservative government has taken to emulating the authoritarianism of its new Chinese overlords so smoothly? What's next?

Harper in Copenhagen: a feat of MASSIVE diversion?

A war of words has erupted between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the premier of Quebec, with Jean Charest tearing a strip off Ottawa's environmental performance.

In 25 years in politics, Charest says, he's never seen a federal government rely so heavily on the White House before taking a position on an issue, with Ottawa now saying it will model its climate policy on Washington's.

Exactly what did Harper do in Copenhagen? Didn't in fact Stevie Passive refuse to participate actively in the discussions and negotiations, and thus tacitly supported China's strategy at the climate change conference?

China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. [...] China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait.

[Mark Lynas] saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. [...] the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as "a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. [...]

The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors".

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and [...] Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point.

Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition. China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised.

So, back to Stevie Spiteful's shameful performance in Copenhagen. Remember where Stevie traveled before he went to Denmark?

A capitalist country that's perfected a secular model of authoritarian government? A country that holds $800 billion of the U.S. debt? A country Stevie once disdained but now embraces.

Could it be that Stevie and his Harpocrites are kowtowing to their new economic overlords? And, contrary to the overt declaration from the Harper Government, Canada has now become one of China's puppets, with regard to climate change?

In 1 ... 2 ... 3 .... Shrieeek!

This was completely predictable, of course.

A Senior Vatican figure, Spanish Cardinal Antonio Canizares, prefect for the Congregation of the Divine Worship, this week appeared to downplay the findings of the Ryan report when suggesting that the millions of lives lost through abortion represent a much more serious crime against humanity than clerical sex abuse.

How candid. Feminazis that we are here at DAMMIT JANET! we thought that the logic behind his statement deserved a closer look.

Oh, looky here.

Christine Buckley, barely a month old was found guilty of being the child of an unwed mother. For decades, such “sins” were sufficient to land children — and more than 30,000 others — in workhouse-style schools for girls and boys run by the
Roman Catholic Church.

At such schools, according to a long-awaited report Wednesday, children were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for more than half a century.

A “culture of silence” protected victimizers rather than the children in their care — consigning generations of Ireland’s poorest children to misery, Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse has concluded. ...

These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s to the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators.

The panel found that sexual molestation was “endemic,” committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities. ...The five-volume report is a major blow for a religious institution that continues to wield significant influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t tough enough for some of the victims who lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. Many are angry that the report includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for — and won — in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report’s findings.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Buckley, now 62.

She spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where she said children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.

Rosaries, hmmm. Who knew the Vatican Taliban was concerned with the loss of enslaved child-labour in Ireland? It's no wonder then that Blob Blogging Wingnut is so ecstatic about the growing encroachment of Catholicism in China. If "sinful" women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, then it would certainly be financially salutory for such children born "in sin" to labour in rosaries-manufacturing sweat-shops run by the Catholic Church - covertly of course.