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It has happened before and it will happen again is an apt description of immunisation scares in Australia.

I was horrified to learn that 334 cases of whooping cough have occurred on the Central Coast this year. This is a deadly, preventable disease. In Queensland, you find parents not wanting to immunise their children even with a measles outbreak.

At the moment I’m not sure where people are getting their anti-immunisation ideas from but it is irresponsible.

The department of Health and Ageing has a good website on the facts of immunisation. The pdf, The Realities: Disease Preventable by Vaccines shows the effectiveness of vaccines over the years. Vaccines do work and are important to preventing deaths from many diseases.

It would be sad to see that anti-vaccination quackery is one more making its insidious way through the population. Hopefully it may just be a seasonal flux and not a sign of something sinister.

Bikies run amok at Sydney Airport and we start to hear cries that we need to have machine gun toting guards to save us all.

The idea is stupid. It is just another act in the long-running performance of security theatre. It is wise to be circumspect in regards to knee jerk reactions that only protect against a very unusual albeit chaotic incident.

A notion that will surely bring about at least one elephant of the apocalypse is that I agree with Peter Faris that Mick Keelty should be stood down. Keelty’s reputation is in such a state that any more trampling on it will not produce any noticeable damage. It is trashed enough.

One thing is fer sure, the coordination between Sydney Airport’s regular security and the AFP is atrocious. That itself is a major issue with airport security that needs to be addressed. For the greater security threat are not metal bollards in the check-in terminal or not having enough machine guns for the AFP. It is the petty arguments over jurisdiction that really harm security.

And the heads of such organisations rendered impotent by the need to play politics.

Via the New York Times, I stumbled on the remarkable story of the incredibly obscure proto-punk band Death.

Death were a Detroit band that inspired by the Stooges, MC5 and Led Zeppelin. Never mind that they were African-American which was unusual (and still is Bad Brains and Living Colour not withstanding). They rocked and …For the Word to See is a gem of a release. It was an immediate download when I found it on iTunes.

Bookended by Keep on Knocking and Politicians in my Eyes which were originally released as a single, the lost tracks burn ferociously. A tad of self indulgence is scattered here and there revealing a prog-rock influence. Don’t let that worry you as when they focus, as on Rock’n'Roll Victim and Freakin’ Out they rock hard. Keep on Knocking whispers forward in time to Husker Du (albeit not with Bob Mould’s saturated guitar). The almost epic Politicians in my Eyes hangs onto a speed R&B riff before dissolving into long, wet, slashing jam at the end. Unfortunately the lyrics are still relevant.

I’ve played Death to death this week. Hard to believe that the music was all recorded back in 1974 and pre-dates so many bands considered punk. That is the great thing about music being digital. Undeservedly forgotten artists can now get their due.

Over here in Oz, the religious folk are upset that Aussies (at least in New South Wales and Victoria) can now have a flutter on Good Friday.

But the apoplexy of the god botherers has been added to by the fact that:

Eighty retailers have meanwhile applied to the New South Wales Director General of Commerce to be allowed to trade on Easter Sunday.

The Australian Retailers Association says Tasmania and the ACT already have provisions allowing trading on those days.

Its chief executive, Margy Osmond, says many people want to shop and many staff are happy to work because of the penalty rates.

Truly, the tragedy of Good Friday is that if you run out of beer, you can’t get any. Bottlos are closed. You have to stock up the night before.

But seriously, I kinda like the fact that almost everything is closed on Good Friday. I know it sounds old fashioned but Good Friday is a day when the world seems to slow down a little. All quiet as no-one is rushing around the in service of commerce. It is reminiscent of my days of youth when there was no Sunday trading apart from the newsagent. Time slowed (as it still does back up North). Something that I miss today; that ability for a day to pass lazily by and the feeling that you have some control over what is left of your time.

It doesn’t really bother me one way of the other. I just like the holiday. But I do like these days (Good Friday and Christmas) where life just slows down for a tad.

Note that Mark 15:24 records gambling on Good Friday.

Woe is the global economy. Times are perilous indeed and many people are affected by the scarcity of paid employment. And while we labour under the strain of these calamitous economic climes, it would be churlish for us not to acknowledge the hardships of our betters

Let it be known that the insanely rich are having a rough time of it as well. And it none better exemplified by the new Upper Crust album, Revenge for Imagined Slights.

A collection of ten tunes (mp3 only available from their website) continue with their AC/DC and Ramones inspired rakish riffage. A music that has:

…a hint of young cherry and a faint tang that lingers long after the aforementioned tracks have quietly gathered up their garments, pocketed your valuables and left the room.

Consider The Upper Crust a musical form of trickle down economics. If we ensure their success in these dark ages then one day, we too may be able to roque and roll.

Since there is not much happening in the US of A lately, the big story is whether or not Rush Limbaugh, the famous big fat idiot (if Al Franken is to be believed), is the King of the GOP, or the newly clothed emperor. More »

I perfectly understand the Catholic Church’s opposition to an abortion for a 9 year girl who became pregnant with twins after being raped by her step-father. It is the reaction of a moribund institution whose commitment to an absolute stance on the topic of abortion reveals the church hierarchy to be a bunch of ethically vacuous, misogynistic, out of touch crazy, clueless corrupt,cretinous clergy. Apart from their lawyer who also condemned the abortion. He isn’t part of the clergy (I don’t think) so he is just a ethically vacuous, misogynistic clueless cretin.

The churches attitude that the girl could carry the babies to full term and have a caesarean is just mind boggling. As the doctors pointed out, the girl’s uterus was not developed enough for the development of one child let alone two. Going to term would have prevented significant health risks. Given the anguish already visited upon her and the danger to her life, there was no other option.

Note that the doctors and mother have been threatened with excommunication. As OzAtheist points out, as little effect it would have on me (I was raised as a Catholic – never handed in my resignation but figured that I didn’t need to), it is a serious punishment especially in Brazil which is heavily Catholic.

The Catholic church’s adherence to absolute dogmatism simply illustrates that they have no idea and have no claim to being a moral leader. In this case, their misogynistic attitude shows that it is better in their view to continue to punish the daughter. The rapist responsible for all this pain probably just needs to say the Hail Mary a few times and he’ll be right.

That says a lot about the Catholic church’s so called morality.

A whining economic illiterate poser it seems. Not quite the superhuman capitalist as Randroids will have you believe.

Via Obsidian Wings, an amusing aspect of Obama’s economic policies are those who feel that their talents are so valuable, so important, that they are going to drop our of society. Apparently this is supposed to result in a dramatic collapse of society or something and we then beg on our knees to come back and save us. The profile of this economic fantasy was raised by an ABC News report on the John Galt wannabes.

The reality is that anyone who goes John Galt in a delusional fantasy that they are sticking it to the man won’t be noticed by the economy at all. Someone willing to work for the same pay or more will fill their place. They won’t be missed and life will happily bubble on without their input.

The other argument I find bemusing is the idea that an increase in marginal tax will stop those working in the highest bracket of being more productive. I’ll wager that most are on a fixed salary. They get paid the same whether they do 40, 50 or 60 hours a week. There may be some sort of performance bonus tied in but that still would not be fixed to how may hours they work. I’m at a loss to work our where any productivity decrease would come from.

Given the reasoning behind those “going Galt” its gotta be a net boon to the US economy as well as the collective intelligence of the American worker for them to quietly sink into their delusions.

Okay, I was being a little bit silly with the idea of Shark Jihad but after the attack yesterday at Avalon, reality has once again trumped satire.

The so called plague of sharks has lead the NSW Opposition to claim the government is not doing enough to protect people from the shark menace.

One thing that must be noted is that all three attacks have happened around dawn or dusk. Precisely the wrong time to be in the water if you want to avoid a shark. So aerial patrols won’t do much (unless these are sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their head and visible at night or in low light). .

Of course, there are those that just want to go a kill sharks. But sharks are not fast breeders and as apex predators, a decline in shark numbers could very much create an ecological imbalance that would harm fisheries in general. The claim of a dramatic increase in numbers is anecdotal and a form of selection bias. It may be that there are more sharks closer to shore (due to increased bait fish activity for example) but no dramatic increase in the number of sharks overall.

There is great gap between the perceived risk of a shark attack and the real risk. There are many ordinary activities that we engage in every day that pose a far greater danger to us. But sharks do spark a primal response in humans and a good shark scare is a gold mine for the media.

Sex researcher Bettina Arndt is one of those political changelings who in changing their views tend to adopt exact opposite of their original position. It is very evident in the the press for her new book, The Sex Diaries in which she reckons women should just lie back and think of England to satisfy their men. Or a rape cheerleader if you don’t want to mess around with euphemisms.

There was great report in ABC radio today which I can’t find in which an academic skewered Arndt’s shallow reporting. A very valid criticism was of how Arndt invited people to submit diaries which hence skewed the results and also didn’t take into account other research. Another unsavoury aspect of Arndt’s reporting is that it inspired a Paul Sheehan column.

Sheehan echoes Arndt’s mindless “battle of the sexes” dribble though he does get communication (whether it be about lack of desire or a male-centric view of foreplay) is a problem.

It would be nice if someone reported on what makes a good marriage, on what couples do to keeps things nicely ticking over. But happy stories don’t sell as well as the self-perpetuating myth of the “battle of the sexes.”

Arndt is supposed to be doing a blog for the SMH. Any bets on her using a gross distortion of an evo-psych argument to support her views?