You know when you’re watching a football game, and the spunky, sprite running back is twisting and juking, amazing the crowd, and all of the sudden, at the worst possible moment, the running back fumbles, giving momentum to the other team, and then the coach sits the distraught player down for the rest of the game. Well, this week that running back was Michelle Bachmann and her fumble was a backfired attack on Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

While it’s legitimate or at least debatable to score points against Perry for his cronyism with Merck (et. al.) or his mandate that all schoolgirls receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine, it comes off as downright wacky McCarthyism (Jenny, not Joe) to imply a link between vaccination and “mental retardation.”

Here’s Ed Morrissey:

[Bachmann] “There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.

The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix.  Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs.  The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare.

The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases.  That started with a badly-botched report in Lancet that allowed one researcher to manipulate a ridiculously small sample of twelve cases in order to reach far-sweeping conclusions about thimerasol.  That preservative hasn’t been included in vaccines for years, at least not in the US, and the rate of autism diagnoses remain unchanged.

The most charitable analysis that can be offered in this case for Bachmann is that she got duped into repeating a vaccine-scare urban legend on national television.  It looks more like Bachmann sensed that she had won a point and wanted to go in for the kill, didn’t bother to check the facts, and didn’t care that she was stoking an anti-vaccination paranoid conspiracy theory, either.  Neither shines a particularly favorable light on Bachmann.

Rick Santorum took the correct position on the Gardasil issue.  We mandate certain vaccines in children because we mandate children be gathered for educational purposes for many years (in private or public schools), and certain diseases are easily communicable in those settings.  By mandating vaccinations against whooping cough, measles, and mumps, we are protecting children who would otherwise get exposed without any action on their part except compliance with the law.  That’s not true with HPV, and parents should decide for themselves whether to inoculate their sons and daughters with Gardasil or Cervarix.  If Perry wanted to make those inoculations more accessible, he could have crafted an opt-in system rather than forcing parents to opt out.

Other than solid backing from Tea Partyists I don’t think Bachmann had much chance for a presidential bid. However, this fumble may have eliminated her from the VP slot as well.

I found this analysis interesting particularly because it runs contrary of everything we’re told:

What fraction of U.S. consumer spending goes for goods labeled “Made in China” and what fraction is spent on goods “Made in the USA”?

• The vast majority of goods and services sold in the United States are produced here. In 2010, imports were about 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP); imports from China amounted to 2.5 percent of GDP.
• A total of 88.5 percent of U.S. consumer spending is on items made in the United States.
• Chinese goods account for 2.7 percent of U.S. personal consumption expenditure — about one-quarter of the 11.5 percent foreign share.

Vanity Fair recently had a pair of thorough exclusives regarding what are to date the most severe, costly and intrusive cyber-attacks in history. Some of these hacks were conducted by the anarchist groups Anonymous and LulzSec, but the really disturbing facet of the articles regard the Chinese government allegedly orchestrating highly sophisticated and successful security breaches against Western c0mpanies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

An investigation by the software company McAfee, called Operation Shady Rat, “has been stealing valuable intellectual property (including government secrets, e-mail archives, legal contracts, negotiation plans for business activities, and design schematics) from more than 70 public- and private-sector organizations in 14 countries. The list of victims, which ranges from national governments to global corporations to tiny nonprofits, demonstrates with unprecedented clarity the universal scope of cyber-espionage and the vulnerability of organizations in almost every category imaginable.”

The evolution of Shady rat ’s activity provides more circumstantial evidence of Chinese involvement in the hacks. The operation targeted a broad range of public- and private-sector organizations in almost every country in Southeast Asia—but none in China. And most of Shady rat ’s targets are known to be of interest to the People’s Republic. In 2006, or perhaps earlier, the intrusions began by targeting eight organizations, including South Korean steel and construction companies, a South Korean government agency, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, a U.S. real-estate company, international-trade organizations of Western and Asian nations, and the ASEAN Secretariat. (According to McAfee’s “Operation Shady rat ” white paper, “[t]hat last intrusion began in October [2006], a month prior to the organization’s annual summit in Singapore, and continued for another 10 months.”) In 2007, the activity ramped up to hit 29 organizations. In addition to those previously targeted, new victims included a technology company owned by the Vietnamese government, four U.S. defense contractors, a U.S. federal-government agency, U.S. state and county government organizations, a computer-network-security company—and the national Olympic committees of two countries in Asia and one in the West, as well as the I.O.C. The Olympic organizations, strikingly, were targeted in the months leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Shady rat ’s activity continued to build in 2008, when it infiltrated the networks of 36 organizations, including the United Nations—and reached a crest of 38 organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, in 2009. Since then, the victim numbers have been dropping, but the activity continues. Shady rat ’s command-and-control server is still operating, and some organizations, including the World Anti-doping Agency, were still under attack as of last month. (As of Tuesday, according to a WADA spokesman, the group was unaware of any breach, but “WADA is investigating” McAfee’s discovery.) The longest compromise duration—“on and off for 28 months,” according to McAfee’s report—was one Asian country’s Olympic committee. Many others were compromised for two full years. Nine organizations were compromised for one month or less. All others were compromised for a minimum of one month, potentially allowing for complete access to all data on their servers.

… Alperovitch’s diagnosis of the problem raised by Shady rat is troubling: “It’s clear from this and other attacks we’ve been witnessing that there is an unprecedented transfer of wealth in the form of trade secrets and I.P., primarily from Western organizations and companies, falling off the truck and disappearing into massive electronic archives. What is happening to this data? Is this being accumulated in a giant, Indiana Jones–type warehouse? Or is it being used to create new products? If it’s the latter, we won’t know for a number of years. But if so, it’s not just a problem for these companies, but also for the governments of the countries where these companies are located, because they’re losing their economic advantage to competitors in other parts of the world overnight. That is a national-security problem, insofar as it leads to loss of jobs and lost economic growth. That’s a serious threat.”

The National Security Agency went into the private sector to create another group, dubbed Operation Starlight, to study these and other cyber attacks against the West, particularly the embarrassing compromise of the software/VPN security firm RSA. RSA’s specialty is providing sophisticated VPN software and tokens. Earlier this year, RSA’s SecurID token algorithms were compromised. Like McAfee, Starlight’s draft conclusion (the final report is in progress and could change) found an “organized, concerted campaign on behalf of China.”

So how bad is the threat? There are indications that the threat is worse than what has been reported thus far, because many companies do not wish to disclose to the public that they have been the victim of a security breach. A recent breach of Google’s servers, since labeled as Operation Aurora, for example, gave away intellectual property and company secrets that its owners no doubt worry will be used against them in the years ahead.

Google’s initial announcement of Operation Aurora stated that “at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors”—had been affected, and early news reports named Yahoo and Symantec as among the other victims. As the year wore on, the body count grew: Adobe, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace admitted that they’d been attacked, then Intel. Before long a cache of e-mails written by analysts at the security firm HBGary and its sister company HBGary Federal were made public, after the companies were caught in the crosshairs of the hacktivist group Anonymous, a loose coalition of individuals who perform coordinated cyber-attacks, sometimes with the stated goal of advancing Internet freedom. The e-mails revealed that Aurora or similar attacks had also hit Baker Hughes, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Conoco Phillips, Marathon Oil, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Symantec, Juniper, Disney, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, General Dynamics, the law firm King & Spalding, and DuPont. DuPont was hit so intensely that, one HBGary analyst wrote, “their hair is on fire.”

Not only did the HBGary e-mails provide new details about Aurora, they also described similar attacks that had been going on for much longer than the public knew. “Many of the leading defense contractors … all had … aurora-type attacks as far back as 2005,” one analyst wrote. “So a search engine makes a big media stink about one intrusion, and that leads to a bunch of hype? I think the discussion needs to be on why it’s taken 5+ years for the rest of the industry to catch on.”

…

Another security researcher who was on the front lines during Operation Aurora says, “Those of us who are hands-on-keyboard want this story to be told, because we feel like the top corporate managers—following the advice of their lawyers—are reflexively keeping breach information secret from other companies that are trying to defend themselves. In the big picture, a little bit of short-term embarrassment is worth it, to get the American people to understand that there’s a low-level Cold War going on.” Despite—and also because of—the extreme secrecy surrounding industrial cyber-espionage, this phenomenon is gradually effecting a fundamental re-arrangement of the relationship between state and corporate power.

Michael Hayden was the director of the N.S.A. and then the C.I.A. during the period when the problem of Chinese cyber-espionage developed. In a conversation with him about Operation Aurora, I asked what he believed to be the most significant fact about those intrusions.

He answered, “You see Google acting in some ways as nation-states used to act, exercising to the best of their ability some attributes traditionally associated with sovereign states. ‘We’re going to break relationship’—cease doing business there, you know. It’s something I dwell on a lot. The cyberworld is so new that the old structures, you know—state, non-state, public, private—they all break down … The last time we had such a powerful discontinuity is probably the European discovery of the Western Hemisphere. At that point, we had some big, multi-national corporations—East India Company and Hudson’s Bay—that acted as states. And I see elements of that with the big Microsofts and Googles of the world. Because of their size, they actually are making decisions that have the impact of the kinds of decisions made in the halls of government. Google is not a state. But what constitutes Google’s inherent right of self-defense in this new environment against this kind of attack? I’m not accusing anyone of doing anything wrong. These situations are just so different. What do we believe would be legitimate for Google to do in response to this? Now, I don’t have answers. I really don’t know, but it’s a really good question.”

While understandable, the hesitancy not to publicize these security breaches only harms the companies in the long run. That’s because most of the hacks are successful because the adversary – hacker – exploits the companies own resources — it’s employees. Using a technique called “spear-phishing,” hackers browse through social media websites in order to collect information about people who work at a particular firm. They then custom script targeted e-mails and utilities which an unsuspecting employee clicks upon, and inadvertently gives network access to the hacker. The first step in employee training and education is acknowledging that the is an Advanced Persistent Threat.

Here’s a great excerpt from Andrew McCarthy:

Say a governor and state legislature had enacted a scheme to establish a state religion, or at least to advantage one religion over others. One could argue that this was — or was not — unwise policy. It certainly seems as hostile to liberty as the idea of coercing a citizen to buy a commodity as a condition of citizenship. Yet, for the first 160 years of governance under the federal constitution, there would have been nothing objectionable about it under U.S. law. Until the Supreme Court suddenly decided to “incorporate” the Establishment Clause against the states, the First Amendment was no bar. The federal government, as Jefferson put it, was “interdicted from intermeddling” in matters of religion — religion was an issue left to the states and their citizens, and we trusted them to handle it responsibly.

That is the way our system is supposed to work. The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them — and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things — meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society — which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

In an article noting a gradual but measurable increase in CIA’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assassinate terrorists I was struck by how ironic, predictable and asinine was the criticism by human rights groups.

[Wa. Post] About 20 percent of CIA analysts are now “targeters” scanning data for individuals to recruit, arrest or place in the cross­hairs of a drone. The skill is in such demand that the CIA made targeting a designated career track five years ago, meaning analysts can collect raises and promotions without having to leave the targeting field.

Critics, including some in the U.S. intelligence community, contend that the CIA’s embrace of “kinetic” operations, as they are known, has diverted the agency from its traditional espionage mission and undermined its ability to make sense of global developments such as the Arab Spring.

Human rights groups go further, saying the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn’t officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules.

“We’re seeing the CIA turn into more of a paramilitary organization without the oversight and accountability that we traditionally expect of the military,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Now, these are the same human rights groups that have criticized all non-lethal avenues of action that the CIA could possibly take. Human rights groups like the ACLU were against enhanced interrogation, against interning terrorists as POWs at Guantanamo and other military facilities (another irony considering they had for so long lobbied that Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists be treated as standard prisoners of war, such as German and Japanese POWs kept in military camps until the end of the Second World War), against rendition, against solitary confinement (seriously), against military tribunals, even against the same kind of wiretapping and hidden surveillance that has been employed against organized crime for decades. Having used friendly court districts packed with bleeding-heart liberal judges to sue all possible non-lethal actions that the federal government could potentially take against enemies who disguise themselves as civilians, hijack aircraft and slam them into buildings, it is only natural that this government decided that the best way to deal with terrorists was to kill them rather than capture them.

What else did they expect would happen?

From the Esquire article. (Part 2 here).

Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

One last post on the London riots a couple of weeks ago, in this case an observation from Jonah Goldberg.

If you begin a sentence saying that nothing excuses wanton mob violence and theft, but refuse to come to a full-stop with a period or, better yet, an exclamation point, you know that there’s a “but” coming that will invalidate all of the platitudes that came before it. When someone says, “There’s no excuse for violence, but . . . ,” that “but” is a Pandora’s box of leftist banshees that have left human wreckage in their wake for millennia.

Ultimately, the Left’s weakness for riots stems, I believe, from two things: statist paternalism and power-worship. It’s an amazingly reactionary sentiment when you think about it. The lower classes are savages who need the benign power of the state to keep them from acting on their savage instincts. When the state doesn’t nurture and civilize them, the urban masses revert to their animal natures. The Left doesn’t condone the violence, of course, they just say the violence is to be expected when conservatives cut social spending. Or as I put it in my column, “In other words, the cuts don’t justify the violence, but the threat of violence justifies avoiding cuts.” On a cynical level, when the lower classes rise up and wreak havoc, the self-appointed spokesmen for society’s “victims” see an opportunity to press their advantage. They hold up the mob like a Medusa’s Head, to petrify the bourgeoisie into making ever more concessions.

As for power worship, there’s always been something about the power of crowds that seduces the leftist mind (see Liberal Fascism). There’s also something about the “authenticity” of street thugs that’s intoxicating to liberals and way too many young people generally, particularly if there’s a racial component thrown in. (If the Black Panthers were white, everyone would instantly recognize them as indistinguishable from neo-Nazis.) How else to explain how so many middle class and even upper class criminals got caught up in this authentic expression of lumpenproletarian rage?

Andrew McCarthy has a great observation in last weekend’s GOP debate, which found Mitt Romney utilizing Federalism in order to attack Obamacare even as he (still, foolishly) defends Romneycare — mandates by a state versus the federal government. While McCarthy believes Romney’s recent discovery of Federalism is simply a convenient ploy to deflect criticisms, he finds Romney’s argument nonetheless factually perfect.

The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them — and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things — meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society — which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

If I were living in Massachusetts (or anyplace else), I would argue that health care is not a corporate asset and that it’s none of anyone’s business whether I choose to buy coverage. But if I lost that debate, and if the coercive mandate law bothered me enough, I could move to some state where the law was different. Or I might decide that, in the greater scheme of things, life in Massachusetts was worth enduring the nuisance and costs of state policies to which I objected. But in either event, none of my calculations would be the concern of someone living in, say, Colorado — at least as long as he wasn’t being made to pay for it.

To the contrary, Romney’s competitors opined that the federal constitution barred states like Massachusetts from imposing an individual mandate as part of an effort to ensure that every citizen in the state was covered. And from there, the putative champions of limited government went haywire. Some want gay marriage banned. Some want abortion banned and criminalized. If you listened to them long enough, it was like listening to Democrats: If I disapprove of it, surely it must be prohibited. If I approve, surely it must be the law.

I confess to thinking we’ve lost our way. The Framers gave us a federal constitution for a confident, self-determining people — people who could be trusted to make sensible choices, to govern themselves through legislation rather than be strait-jacketed in the uncompromising logic of law.

… [Our overspending woes and massive national debt] gets solved only by drastically slashing the functions of the central government. It gets solved by zeroing out departments, agencies, and bureaucracies; by returning those functions to the states so that the people directly affected can decide what ought to be done and how much they’re willing to pay for it — not with other people’s money but with their own.

What does McCarthy forecast our chances of this occurring? Zero! Heh. That’s hardly the attitude that brought down King George, eh Andrew?

There was a great commentary today by Bill McGurn regarding the state of religious freedom in America today, and where that’s trending (hint, not up). McGurn’s opinion cited a recent case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which the Supreme Court agreed to hear shortly.

The background of the case centers on a teacher working at this small religious school who was fired for breaking a church belief of taking church disputes outside the community (in this case punitive action against the teacher due to absenteeism). But what’s really on trial here isn’t one teacher or one school, rather the idea that the First Amendment guarantees the freedom to exercise ones religion (not just a freedom to believe, but exercising it) based on the rules that religion.

At the core of their concern is just this: the politically correct rewriting of the First Amendment. Post-1791, what made America’s religious freedom truly radical was not simply that it allowed people to worship (or not to worship) as they saw fit. The radical part was the guarantee it gave to corporate freedoms: to hold property together, to own newspapers, to run schools, to open hospitals and clinics, etc.

That understanding is now up for grabs. Last week, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said approval for a local merger that would create a new Catholic hospital system will depend on maintaining a “public mission”—by which he means the performance of procedures, such as sterilization, at odds with church teaching.

In San Francisco, opponents of circumcision recently attempted to outlaw it via state ballot. The California State University system has been found within its legal rights to deem a Christian fraternity and sorority unfit for recognition. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board declared that two Catholic colleges are not in fact Catholic.

These are not cases of people trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Instead they involve the question whether faith communities are free to live their own beliefs in their own institutions. Somehow the more “tolerant” we become, the more difficult that becomes.

Given: in cases of a religion forbidding modern medicine or pharmaceuticals, etc., which leads to death, particularly that of a child who has no power to decide for themselves, this issue becomes more complex. But in the case of a an adult teacher joining a private institution knowing full well its rules, I have no sympathy. When you join a particular group, you submit to that communities values and policies — and this, by the way, is a principle pillar of rationale behind the 10th Amendment and Federalism (The U.S. Constitution defined specific power, yielding all others to the states and the people, i.e. communities, whereas the states could define any powers except those bestowed to the federal government via the Constitution. Don’t like your state, you can move and force the other 49 to compete).

That is, if one can simply force a group to mend its beliefs — albeit justified when being deprived of life, liberty or pursuit of happiness — the very definition of a “group” becomes meaningless.

Here’s the best retort and thought of the week on what I call the entitlement-hooligan riots in the U.K.

Presumably, London-type riots would not last long in either Texas, or Arizona. — Adam Baldwin on twitter.

Indeed. Thank God for the Second Amendment. I say thank God rather than “Thank Jefferson” because even Jefferson would have understood that such a right is natural, bestowed by The Creator, or if you’re not religious at very least by virtue of having been born a human being. Contrast that with the grand Ponzi scheme, house-of-cards, and castle built on sand known as the Entitlement State, which you better believe is bestowed by consent of the government, rather than by the governed. Things legislated as exceptions and fractions have grown into behemoths as rule and whole. Even so, fully expect that as our 80-million-checks a month government grows amok such riots will no doubt begin here once those government dole checks end. That’s the trap of Socialism-lite — rather difficult to replug that genie once it’s out.