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Stop Jenny McCarthy

I think you'll enjoy this:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/roeper/1234635,CST-NWS-roep22.article

...

McCarthy blames an MMR vaccine for causing her son's autism. She says a strict diet has helped him enormously. And she tells Us Weekly, "I made a deal with God. I said, 'You fix my boy, you show me the way and I'll teach the world how I did it.' "

You'd think if God was going to make such a deal, he'd grant the power to someone in, you know, the medical community.

Amanda Peet said parents who don't vaccinate their children are "parasites." (She later apologized for the choice of words.) McCarthy countered by saying there's "an angry mob" on her side.

I'm no more of an expert than Leary et al. What I have learned is there's no hard evidence linking vaccines to autism. Studies indicate it is a neurobiological disorder with a genetic basis. And a lot of medical experts are alarmed by McCarthy's high-profile crusade against vaccines.

Besides, if McCarthy's son was able to "recover" from autism thanks to a new diet, doesn't that take the vaccine off the hook? Or maybe the child was just misdiagnosed.
 
Is there anything I can do to help? I'm really excited about this project. I can provide techinical help with php, mysql, css, etc. So far it looks like just static content so probably not too much I can add at the moment but please keep me in mind if you need a coder.
 
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portlandatheist said:
Is there anything I can do to help? I'm really excited about this project. I can provide techinical help with php, mysql, css, etc. So far it looks like just static content so probably not too much I can add at the moment but please keep me in mind if you need a coder.
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We could definitely use all the help we can get. One possible way you could help is to help us find ways to promote the site so we can get it a high listing on Google and other search engines as well as possible media exposure.
 
Why don't we start a facebook group "Stop Jenny McCarthy" . We can attract Facebook traffic to the site. Also, I have another link you may consider:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10997
This eighth and final report of the Immunization Safety Review Committee examines the hypothesis that vaccines, specifically the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and thimerosal-containing vaccines, are causally associated with autism. The committee reviewed the extant published and unpublished epidemiological studies regarding ...
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ETA: I guess there already is a facebook group
 
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Jenny is making the talk show rounds now promoting "Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3"
where she is the voice of Tanya. I hope EA Games has told her to cut out the woo while she is promoting the game.
 
Just came across this article about vaccine/autism woo, which mentions Jenny McCarthy.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081103/smallwood

Back Talk: Paul Offit By Christine Smallwood

October 16, 2008

At least eight scientific studies have shown that there is no link between vaccines and autism, but thousands of Americans continue to believe that the tiny quantities of ethylmercury in the vaccine preservative thimerosal cause autism. (Thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines by 2001, and autism rates have not declined.) Parents skeptical of the effects of vaccines have subjected their children to expensive, sometimes dangerous quack cleansing remedies including laser therapy, sonar depuration, special diets and chelation therapy, in which a child is injected with chemicals that bind to mercury. Chelation therapy is known to have killed one child, 5-year-old Abubakar Tariq Nadama. In Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia, $24.95), Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, explains how the anti-vaccine movement became powerful enough to drown out the real science behind autism research.

cont...
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Thought the article might come in handy for the site, if it hasn't been linked to already.
 
Thank you! And another linky:

http://skeptools.com/2008/10/27/long-tail-of-skeptical-web/


I strongly believe that we as skeptics should be looking to set up more sites like Stop Jenny McCarthy and fewer general-purpose sites or blogs. In fact, I think we are missing the boat on many skeptical topics by not having more specialized sites. To explain why, I have to talk about the long tail...
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:cool: Lots of good reading there too. I'm fiding the comments sections very helpful.

And even more information on Search engine optimization that I had no clue about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
 
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calm down. no worries. whoever owns the domain only needs to ftp into their site, or from their control panel, just look at the subdomain: site and delete it.
 
That's the problem though. You log in through the link at www.stopjenny.com. There is no access to the ftp when you do a site through website tonight and smartspace. Would like to directly upload the new website with new software to the domain, but the domain is tied to the restrictive smartspace for now. argh.
 
Jenny is a victim of "Naive science" - she just wants to make sense of what is happening to her. This has led her on a wild goose chase from indigo child to autism, and a merry go round of unproven and potentially dangerous alternative "cures" for her son's problems. Her altered and upgraded celebrity status is a behaviourally-reinforcing bonus, and has given her life and career new purpose.

To determine cause and effect, everyone has a host of expectations based upon their beliefs about their world and their situation. But "The truth is rarely pure, and never simple" (Oscar Wilde, The importance of being earnest).

She knows what it is she wants to see, so she sees it (this equally applies to "evidence" about toxins as it does to "evidence" Evan started to talk sfter B12, or diflucan, or chelation or whatever).

Her memories of Evan's development/autism seem to be all over the place - the time line is confusing, different events have great significance placed on them, and there are numerous inconsistencies in her story. (Someone should really document all of these for the stopjenny site sometime, but unfortunately it would mean reading all her books and utterances over the last 5 years). Jenny's story keeps changing. Why?

It's because she is suffering memory decay (we all do) and the complex tapestry of memories that was woven during Evan's life have become gradually unstitched. To retrieve the memories, she is (sub?)consciuosly weaving new memory threads, which bear no real resemblance to the ones she lost, but which relate to whatever she wants/needs to remember at that point in time. This is how false memories, which seem very real, can be acquired. Remember, hindsight is 20-20 vision.

So when she says something helped Evan, she thinks it was true because she wished it were true, and her memory of the "evidence" has been reworked. She could probably fool a polygraph convincingly (for what they are worth) yet be totally contradictory - [so was it the B12 injections that helped Evan, no it was the diflucan, no it was the Threelac, no it was the gluten free diet, no it was the chelation, etc - she has claimed each of these at some time to be the cause of his verbal recovery]

As an aside, I see the ubiquitous Jenny/Evan road show have done something good for a change - attending a stop malaria benefit. Perhaps she's not all bad? One thing I question is whether Jenny has given much thought to Evan's future as a "recovered/cured" autistic. I doubt a succesion of celebrity benefits and being in the spotlight will have a beneficial outcome for him, merely make his adjustments to reality that much harder.
 
orphia nay said:
Just came across this article about vaccine/autism woo, which mentions Jenny McCarthy.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081103/smallwood



Thought the article might come in handy for the site, if it hasn't been linked to already.
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I thought it was a total of 15 or 16 studies that have now been published specifically exonerating MMR from causing autism, never mind those looking at thimerosal?
Offit mentions 16 in his book.
 
Thank you for your post DeeTee, will try to grab some more time to read it and respond once the new site is edited. There are some links other issue that need to be fixed asap, ooops.

We do need feedback now on the header. Is it too much to tell her stop talking trash? How about the logo? Better?

A bazillion thank you's to Blue Mountain for the hard and quick work to get the site on the net.

For some reason the web site tonight folks are still allowing that horrid page to load at the old "site." link. We never had access to their server from the get go, as the site was just edited online directly using their smartspace software. I've sent some complaints in, but we get the silly response to change our password when we don't even have access to the site anymore. Somebody does though, and it's annoying as all heck.
 
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Bwahaaa! Fixed it!

Technical issues, all of them, now resolved. Now back to adding and editing rather than hair pulling. No bad linky at the old www.site.stopjenny.com either. Is a suitable nothing. Like it should be. Woot.

Whewwww.

Okay, I understand there is like an election in the USA, but...

Exhausted parties are celebrating something else at the moment and going to rest now.
 
If bandwidth costs are an issue, is there any place we can donate via Paypal?
 
I think you may have this linking malarky backwards.

[url=http://www.stopjenny.com]Stop Jenny McCarthy[/url]

Will cause google to link the phrase "Stop Jenny McCarthy" to your site. This is preaching to the choir.

I believe you want;

Stop [url=http://www.stopjenny.com]Jenny McCarthy[/url]

linking "Jenny McCarthy" searches to your site, and hopefully reaching a new audience.
 
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