Yes, religion really is child abuse

This may well be the most disgusting thing I've read about any apparently modern democracy, in a lifetime of being cynical and disgusted by other apparently human beings:

"About 300 children have died in the United States in the last 25 years after medical care was withheld on religious grounds, said Rita Swan, executive director of Children’s Health Care Is a Legal Duty, a group based in Iowa that advocates punishment for parents who do not seek medical help when their children need it. Criminal codes in 30 states, including Wisconsin, provide some form of protection for practitioners of faith healing in cases of child neglect and other matters, protection that Ms. Swan’s group opposes." Trials for parents who chose faith over medicine (New York Times)

I can understand when the uneducated and otherwise ignorant, the frightened and the confused seize hold of bullshit told by the charismatic and refuse to vaccinate children - I will tell them to their face that they're being ignorant and conned, but I can understand it.

But the degree of blind faith that sees people chose prayer which continues to fail as a cure when their child has reached the point of "“Kara laid down and was unable to move her mouth,” the report said, “and merely made moaning noises and moved her eyes back and forth.”" - that is child abuse of the highest order.

"We knew that once we went to the doctor, we would be cut off from God."

That, to me, is a God it is not worth being connected to, not worth believing in, not worth paying any sort of lip-service to. That God, who consistently fails to act when petitioned through prayer and lets children die in frequently horrible circumstances, is deserving only of condemnation and hatred. If you must believe in God, then be angry at this God's conduct.

I don't really have the energy right now to say what I really think, so I'll close with the fervent wish that the people who claim that the neglecting, murderous little family are being "persecuted for praying" burn for all eternity in the hell they believe in.

Link to New York Times article

You'll be eight alive.

Just a short note, because I think everyone should read this, but I really can't add anything to it:

Explaining the Curse of work (New Scientist).

It's wonderful. Finally, Science(tm) explains: Parkinson's Law (Work expands to fill the space avaialble); Why big decision-making groups are bad; Why Terry Pratchett and Chinese numerology chose 8 as the most evil number (I'm extrapolating here, but I think I have a good reason - read the article) - why small teams get more, high quality, work done.

Everyone stuck in a bureaucracy, or cynical about them, will get a good laugh out of it.

Blinkers, blinders and bloody-mindedness: road safety

Few things are more indicative of how we, as a species, just aren't built to inhabit complex, multi-cultural and diverse societies than the opinion poll.

The latest example, dealing with matters particularly close to my heart, is this piece of actually fairly good journalism from the Courier Mail: Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research.

To summarise the background: Bikers are dying in greater numbers.

To summarise the poll findings: Car drivers think that bikers have it coming, because they "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks".

The bikers' response: "Four out of five motorcyclists (78 per cent) think that car drivers believe they have more right to the roads than riders do ... and 90 per cent say drivers don't look out for them," said AAMI Corporate Affairs manager Mike Sopinski.

And:

Adrian Toscano, from the Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland, said there were certainly elements of contempt between drivers of two and four-wheel vehicles.

"Every day riders come across people cutting them off, failing to give way, driving while talking on mobiles and even doing thing like eating breakfast, all while travelling at 60km/h," Mr Toscano said.

Let's go back and deconstruct the phrase "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks":

• Nobody, and I mean nobody, unless they are a trained observer who is paying attention and taking notes, and not even then, can accurately gauge "often". If you see twenty bikers and two of them are weaving through traffic at speed, the chances are you will say "often" about that 10%, becsause it sticks in your mind and the rest just vanish from memory. This is how stereotypes arise - the human mind likes to simplify life by picking up on nice solid warning signs like "4WD vehicle" instead of analysing all aspects of road behaviour in depth, and unfortunately this tendency gets carried over into all other aspects of life.
  
• "Breaking the law" is a phrase that gets sadly overused by people who see something they don't agree with. I give this no credence without more details attached to it.
  
• "Taking unnecessary risks": Such as? Unless you are a rider, or at the very least an above-average driver, such as an advanced driving instructor, I give no credence to the idea that the motorists can actually judge what this is.
  

Put all that together, and you come up with the conclusion that the survey, as presented in this article, is absolutely useless and says more about perceptions and prejudices than about anything useful.

As a motorcyclist, I regularly see other riders behaving in a way that I think is stupid, but they're outnumbered by riders who aren't. My perceptions are also different - I don't think that riding between lines of stationary traffic or on the verge is dangerous unless you're going too fast. In fact, it's often safer. I'm pretty sure that most experienced riders who aren't actually policemen will agree.

And then this:

""The wake-up-to-yourself campaign implied to other road users that all riders have a death wish and, as a result, should be treated with contempt," Mr Toscano said."

Which is exactly what I was saying at the time. Queensland is just about the only place in the world which has managed to product statistics showing that riders are at fault in more than half of multi-vehicle accidents, and the entire advertising campaign addressed those at-fault riders, ignoring the shared responsibility of other road users completely.

What's even sadder is that people can watch ads like that, assume that the government know what they're talking about, and leap effortlessly to the conclusion that riders are their own worst enemy, staying serenely confident of that while they forget to check their blind spot and merge sideways, forcing a bike to brake hard, swerve and get clipped by the car in the other lane.

I don't hate car drivers as a group: I just don't trust them as a group, and I recommend that everyone else has the same attitude. If you trust nobody, you'll be ready when they do something stupid, whether or not they have two wheels, four, or eighteen.

Link to Courier Mail article "Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research

You don't have to be an expert - that'll just annoy you even more.

There are a few things that really shit me about most science fiction, and that includes the new series of Doctor Who. I'm not talking about the big things, like having force fields or faster than light travel. I mean the easy bits of physics (and other sciences), the little bits of detail that just plain aren't necessary to break:

• "200%": the point to 100%, you see, is that it's ALL. As in, EVERYTHING. If it's possible to ever "Go to 200%!" or record a reading on anything over 100%, then you haven't built your equipment properly.
• "An unknown element!": No, actually, we know all of them. All the stable ones, anyway (we can create elements that have a half life shorter than the human mind is any good at comprehending). Unless they get suddenly stable at really BIG atomic numbers (which I believe has been suggested), you're not going to be meeting any new ones. Previously unknown compounds, well, that's easy.
• Sound effects in space. I mean, come ON! Sound requires a medium through which to travel. Space has, roughly, an atom per cubic metre. So, no sound.
• Explosions in space. There is a reason why you don't get fires in zero gravity, I believe - something to do with needing a gravity gradient. However: you don't get a fire if the reactants aren't mixed and in close proximity, either. How long is that going to last, in a vacuum?
• Spaceships sharing a common 'down' and having the same orientation as each other when they meet. Hello? Zero gravity? What's your reference point?
• Making up strange radiation or "particles". Isn't there enough weird physics in the world already? And how do you even get new types of radiation? Apart from changing the frequency?
• Casually passing off psychic powers while everything else has an explanation. No, sorry, you can't slip that past while nobody's looking. Try again.
  
• Nobody ever needs to go to the toilet onboard the TARDIS. Okay, that's just picky.
  

Any other ones you can think of?

Let's think laterally about refugee policy

I have a suggestion. It's not created out of any very deep thought, or even halfway decent consideration. It's just an idea, considered briefly, and thrown into the world to see what happens to it.

These are fairly indisputed facts:

• There is a massive refugee problem worldwide, and particularly in Australia, which has become something of a destination of choice and has a large and ugly legacy of (concentration) camps scattered around Aus and the neighbouring region to highlight this.
• This population of the displaced contains both political asylum seekers fleeing death or torture, and the ambitious opportunistic, looking for a better life in a more affluent society with plumbing and clean water, and everyone in between.
• Australia spends quite a large amount of money each year, I believe over and above UN requests, in international aid programs.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

My suggestion for debate is this: whenever Australia accepts an asylum seeker, we take the cost of doing so out of our aid to that country. You chase your own people away, you can pay us to look after them.

Quite obviously, there are a huge number of arguments around carrot-versus-stick approaches to encouraging behaviour change, and I don't believe that punishment has any legitimacy as a useful tool. However, if we can link aid moneys to human rights performance indicators, can we get it past the moral philosophers, and should we?

It seems it COULD be worse, after all

Following a history of airline hijacking and bombings very nearly as old as airline transportation itself, Al Qaeda has managed to frighten airlines and various federal authorities into instigating a string of measures so draconian that it's hard to keep track of the human rights and logic violations at work.

But, it seems that it could, after all, be worse.

According to the highly entertaining History Without the Boring Bits, in 1972, Jack Jensen, of Fort Worth, Texas (surprise, surprise) suggested installing a hypodermic syringe underneath each seat, allowing hijackers to be injected with a disabling or fatal dose of... something, at the pilot's discretion. Airlines allegedly decided that passengers wouldn't be able to relax, and decided not to adopt this system.

We also have the problem that, quite apart from putting that authority in the hands of the pilot... Don't most terrorists stand up when they start with the whole announcing-themselves-and-making-demands schtick? Particularly if they know about counter-measures like that?

Your daily dose of ludicrous: red pens

If teachers mark students' work with a red pen they run the danger of offending children because red is an "aggressive colour". See Courier mail.

I am nearly at a loss for words.

I can, in fact, hardly do better than the words of Deputy Opposition Leader Mark McArdle, who said:

"Given your 10-year-old Labor government presides over the lowest numeracy and literacy standards of any state in Australia, don't you think it's time we focused on classroom outcomes rather than these kooky, loony, loopy, lefty policies?"

Does it really soften the blow if your essay is returned so smothered with purple ink you can't read it, or the "F" is written in green, or you find "Rat shit" scrawled across the top in a fetching shade of mauve?

But wait, there's more.

Just to illustrate that Queensland seems to be adept at breeding proto-fascist governments of any stripe, see this brilliant piece of wartime-government evasion from our premier:

"Premier Anna Bligh called the question trivial at a time of "such economic peril"."

Well, Anna, if you can't focus on competing demands of government at the same time, resign.

No, it really is about revenue raising

Queensland police, who appear to have noticed that their current speeding deterrents aren't working, are considering publicising the locations of mobile speed cameras, in an attempt to get people to slow down (Courier Mail).

Now, there are many arguments over the use of sneakily hidden (and don't ever try to argue that they aren't - hiding behind bushes, in gulleys beside the road, over the crest of hills...) speed cameras to monitor speed limits. There are at least as many arguments over what the speed limits should be, and how much speeding actually contributes to the road toll, but let's not go there right now. The main complaint, in detailed form, can be summarised thusly:

• There is no deterrent effect to random speeding fines turning up in the mail a couple of weeks after the event.
• Therefore, there're obviously not serious about actually stopping people from speeding.
• Therefore, they're not actually interested in the road toll.
• Therefore, cameras are a revenue-raising exercise.

I think that just about sums it up nicely. Well, have a look at the nice, sweeping, general, claim in that article: If people slow down before getting to the cameras, and don't get booked, then funds received from speed cameras could drop by $30 million. I'll write that again, shall I:

$30 million

So: Every year, speed camera fines add up to somewhere in the region of $30 million, and people are still speeding, and the road toll keeps on climbing. Now, while I'm not in favour of conspiracy theories which claim that the government is doing this deliberately in order to make as much money as possible (medical costs from accident victims, let alone care costs, probably exceed that each year), do you think I would be justified in claiming that we can see here the mark of incompetence?

• Item: People are still speeding
• Item: The road toll is getting worse.
• Item: They've only just now started trying something different.

Yep, doesn't seem all that competent an administration to me.

Now, let's get back to the more contentious issue of whether the police should be doing anything about speeding at all.

Please note, from the article:

"A similar move in 2001 by South Australian police corresponded with a sharp drop in the level of speeding detections.

"But no independent analysis of the program had been done to link the drop with publicity of camera sites."

Notice what's missing? No mention at all of accident rates, or even safety in general, vague terms.

The entire article is talking about speeding, and narry a mention of "every K over is a killer" to be seen.

Which leads me to these three conclusions:

• Incompetent or bored and careless journalists
• A new editorial direction from the Courier Mail
• South Australia didn't see a change in accident rates coinciding with this drop in speeding offences detected.

Now, I can think of two very good possible explanations for that last conclusion:

1. It's not the speed that's the problem, it's the incompetence of the drivers
2. The way people react to an approaching speed camera (braking, taking eyes of the road to glance at the speedometer, nervous twitch of the steering wheel, flashing lights at oncoming drivers who get distracted, etc.) causes crashes.

Obviously, those two are compatible, and indeed probably occur together more often than not.

Here's a thought: train drivers properly. Maybe when they're able to judge safe speeds, distances, and the behaviour of other road users, they might not exceed those limits quite so much.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. That would require the government doing something pro-active and innovative, when it's so much easier to just try and punish, when any matric-level psychology student could explain that punishments don't work.

What I particularly love is the way that the Courier Mail is spinning this: "Revenue to fall". Oh no, if the police try something which might have an impact upon speeding, the government will be worse off!

Are they trying to be sarcastic? That's my job...

No, your irrational and childish beliefs are NOT special

I've already commented on my attitudes towards defamation and religion, here.

(Anybody who feels, at any point while reading this, that I'm a tool of Satan and have it all wrong and are being offensive, really should go and read that first, and then wonder if it's really worth your effort venting at me.)

Now, thanks to the Bronze Dog, I have been made aware that the world is imploding into a B-grade anti-utopian movie plot. The United Nations is condemning defamation of religion.

Okay, maybe you should go and read that earlier post of mine anyway, to get some idea of how complex the whole mess of "defamation law" is.

To start with, is it defamatory to speak the truth? The traditional judicial defence is that if a statement is proven true, it's not defamatory because it's not injuring your reputation, merely lowering it to the status it should have had already. Although in some jurisdictions you still have to argue that you were justified in speaking the truth.

So, if I were to say that the Christian church is basing its teachings (sorry, brainwashings) upon a book which has been translated numerous times, mistranslated, had sections excised and other sections added, and can not accurately be said to represent the teachings as delivered through Jesus: Is that defamatory?

If I were to say that Islam as traditionally and, in many cases, continuously, practiced is, by the standards of my culture, inextricably tied with pederasty, a justice system which has gross human rights violations built in not to mention a complete lack of understanding of human behaviour, and has been responsible for ongoing violatiosn of basic human rights (including hte one about being able to stay alive) world-wide: Is that defamatory?

Of course, I could add that Mormonism violates several basic precepts of my society to do with marriage and basic freedoms as well as having a belief system which moves me to laughter; I could add that Scientology was founded upon works of fiction written by a failed fiction author who is reported to have once stated "If you really want to make money, start a religion", that it has medically unsupported and medically contra-indicated practices, that it shows a complete lack of understanding of psychophysiology and is, in addition, rather silly and uses a basic voltmeter to try and analyse your soul. Besides which, Tom Cruise is a dickwad.

I could also add that the Moonies have given us an invaluable new term of away-with-the-fairiedom and that Sihks have one of the most absurd dress codes I have ever seen.

But what's the point? The world is so addicted to Arab oil that they have a political force over and above all rationality.

So here's what I would like to see: If the UN really upholds defamation of religion as being, like, wrong, let's see the Vatican sue the nearest large Islamic body for defamation. After all, you can't defend the truth-and-the-sole-truth of your religion without saying that others are wrong, can you? And hell, isn't calling a belief system which claims ultimate authority over truth, wrong, defamatory?

Pass the popcorn and, in case this gets completely out of hand, pass the Kool-Aid as well.

America needs to be forbidden from using the word "civilised"

Obama election provokes rise in hate crimes (ABC News Online)

So what they're saying, is that it's either fake, or they're guilty?

Gulf War Syndrome. Probably the most notorious and suspicious health complaint of recent years. Distinct from cases of lungs being eroded by exposure to mustard gas, or confirmed cancer linked to depleted uranium (which many people claim is so weakly radioactive that you basically have to breath in the dust and have it sit in your lungs for years to be at risk), Gulf War Syndrome is a vague and poorly defined disorder (start ringing warning bells now) which afflicts veterans and frustrates diagnosticians. There are weirder dodgy diagnoses, such as Morgellon's Disease, but Gulf War Syndrome is much more widely known.

Most of the informed, knowledgeable commentary I've seen is that GWS is simply PTSD and other psychopathologies, and when you look at the list of symptoms - "persistent headaches, widespread pain, cognitive difficulties, unexplained fatigue, skin rashes, chronic diarrhoea and digestive and respiratory problems" - anyone with a passing knowledge of psychology or medicine in general should see that they are, all of them, possible as symptoms of a strong stress reaction.

And now we have this: Gulf War Illness is real, report finds (ABC News Online).

It has taken since 2002, but a Research Advisory Committee has finally come out and said "Well, there's definitely something going on, but we're not sure what it is. But, dammit, it's there".

Okay, sarcasm mode off for a moment - it's not uncommon for causes to be a bit vague. Just look at Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which has some MRI evidence backing it up. But the problem with GWS is that it displays some depressingly common patterns - self-reports of cognitive deficits exceed actual test resutls, which are age-group normal; the most common symptoms are common in the general population anyway; death rates from general causes are the same as for non-veterans; and, oh yes, my favourite: every major military conflict results in a large collection of veterans with vague symptomatology, a condition which was labelled "shell shock" after WWI and is now known as (drum roll please) PTSD.

So I remain skeptical of people who cry "Gulf War Illness!" when a good swath of tests has found no toxicology, no radiation, and no physiological abnormalities. The US government has an obligation to care for them, but the type of care which is most appropriate may not be what the veterans were expecting. Hey, some of them may even have picked up CFS by pure coincidence.

Have a look at Quackwatch or Wikipedia if you really want to look into the debate.

What stunned me about that ABC article, however, is the list of possible causes: A drug given to troops, pesticides used during the war (why? It's not like Iraq has forests the way Vietnam does, sorry, did), exposure to smoke from oil-well fires and low-level exposure to sarin gas during the destruction of captured stocks.

At this point, any personal injury lawyer or OH&S professional is jumping up and down and shouting about employer responsibility.

Basically, of the four options mentioned, one is the direct result of standard practice within the army, and I can't wait to see the legal shit-fight if that ever gets proven, and the other three are the result of the army failing to provide its soldiers with appropriate and adequate safety clothing. Try doing thaton a building site and see how long you last!

If this report is true, and there is or are physical ailments caused by any of this exposure, it is taking the concept of "friendly fire" to disturbing and innovative levels which not even the US Armed Forces had previously demonstrated themselves capable of.

Link to ABC News Online story "Gulf War Illness is real, report finds"

Scumbags on the road

I had to drive into town this morning. I was gone about an hour, including time spent wandering around Supercheap looking vaguely at anything that might be interesting, and went straight there and straight back. So of course, I only ran into two annoying idiots.

The first one was a fat, silver-haired man with a golfing cover on the spare wheel of his little Suzuki 4WD. He drove at the speed limit where nobody drives at the speed limit, which you can't legitimately complain about, but then, approaching the big double-lane roundabout, he went into the outside lane and then attempted to straighten the roundabout by casually moving into the inside lane and then back to the outside on the exit, sweeping right across the road. I was very nearly drawn level with him when he tried it the first time, too. Illegal, dangerous, rude, inconsiderate and completely unnecessary.

The second one was a small, weedy man with a neat little almost-Hitler moustache and the crazed eyes of a bitter, small, weedy little man. He was driving an old 2WD Hilux ute, and had one hand out the window, resting on the wing mirror which, clearly, he was therefore unable to use to actually see what was behind him - you know, the general intended function of a mirror. Even more disturbingly, when I first spotted this he was running his hand back and forth along the top, as though caressing it. He then went around the last corner at about 30km/h. And the pulled over without indicating.

Note to budding superheros: Lycra melts and offers no protection. Wear bike leathers.

I have an idea for a vigilante-style superhero comic.

It's called "Driver Education Rider and his side-kick, Orbiting Hyper Death Space Ray".

It works something like this:

• Driver Education Rider is riding through traffic, minding his own business, when a large 4WD forces him to take evasive action by merging into him.
• DER pulls up next to the 4WD at the lights.
• DER: "Excuse me sir, but did you see me when you changed lanes back there?"
• Driver: "Huh?"
• DER: *PUNCH*

His sidekick, Orbiting Hyper-Death Space Ray, is in constant radio contact.

• DER: "DER to Orbiting Hyper-Death Space Ray. Did you see that blue vehicle pull out of that side-street?"
• OHDSR: "Sure did, skipper!"
• OHDSR: *VAPORISE*
• DER: "Good work, boy!"
• OHDSR: "Arf! Arf!"

Or, maybe not.

If I had any drawing talent at all I'd do a couple of episodes, for the hell of it.

P.S.: I toyed with the question of whether he should be "Driver Education Rider" or "Driver Re-Education Rider", but since most drivers in need of re-education don't appear to have been educated in the first place, I settled on DER.

Learn to merge or roast in eternal damnation the like of which not even Dante could conceive of!

Yesterday, while driving home, two different people acted as though they wanted to run me off the road and kill me while merging. Over the past week, I have seen so many incompetent examples of what should be a basic driving or riding maneuver that I despair for the continued safety of any road user.

And yet it's not that hard. It shouldn't be that hard.

Merging consists of a few basic principles:

• Find out what other traffic is doing. This involves looking.
  
• Let traffic know what you're trying to do. This means your indicators. You know about them? Orange flashing lights on the corners? Make a clicking sound?
• Check that nobody else is in the space you need to move into.
• Move.

There now, it wasn't that hard, was it?

And yet, there are a few groups of people who have no idea of how to merge or how to cope when somebody else does. These groups are:

• People who refuse to be polite or let anyone else take their bit of road, and rush to block them. These people are assholes.
• People who don't seem to realise that anything is happening, and sit there being an impedient because they can't be bothered to lift off the accelerator a bit. These people are drongos.
• People who expect other people to move out of their way, and drive into the lane without warning or any thought of checking to see if they can. These people are pricks.
• People who are so nervous that they will put their indicator on and then sit there while other people politely make way for them, because they expect you to rush past and block them. You can even flash your headlights at some of these people and they don't get it. This is especially annoying because you're never quite sure if they won't suddenly move just as you decide the hell with it and accelerate past them. These people are sheeple.
  
• People who crowd together while on the slip lane, so that there is no room to make a nice zipper after-you, then-you affair. These people are just plain idiots.
• People who leave it to the last possible minute before dropping back when you clearly have right of way by virtue of being half a car in front, so that you're not quite sure until it's happened whether or not they'll take your bumper off. Or your rear wheel right out from underneath you, if you're on a bike. These people are cock-heads.
• People who only give one flick of the indicator as they are moving. This may be because they have been told they have to use the indicator but don't understand why, but the rapidity with which they move suggests that it is actually because they are worried that if they give warning, they will get blocked by assholes. These people are twats.

And the two people who tried to kill me belonged to another group, and I would label them but the only sufficient insult I can think of is a bit too impolite for me to use in general company, so I'll just call them incompetent, brainless, bullying fuck-heads and leave it at that.

Both of them were in the left hand lane as we sailed into the start of the merging dotted line, one was in a van and one in an oversized 4WD with bullbar, and both of them were sitting behind my bumper but accelerated forwards until their front bumper was level with my B-pillar until they realised that they had run out of road, were driving on the verge (and, in the first case, were parents park to collect their children) and dropped back only just barely far enough to not take my bumper off, and sat there at speeds up to 70, not dropping any further back as though it was an affront to them personally that they had to give way at all, until one overtook me when the road split into two lanes again, and the other one I managed to leave behind uphill.

All I could think of was how much scarier it would have been if I had been riding (which I only wasn't because an incompetent pack of pricks in Victoria hadn't sent me my new sprockets yet), and it was the closest I have ever come to wanting to hunt one of them down and ask "Do you not know how to merge, or were you just being an incompetent, dangerous fuck?"

And there you have it - gross stupidity causes road-rage in others.

Because pirates are actually cool

For those who need a flowchart to spot the fecking obvious:


This is not just music from stores like iTunes, this is games via Nokia for the NGage system, where it was initially thought that if you bought a new phone in six months, you'd lose the ability to play the games you had paid for, unless you bought the exact same software again. This is entire computer operating systems, which disable themselves if you change three pieces of hardware (new hard drive, upgraded DVD burner, new graphics card, new monitor *ZAP!*)

To all those who think that draconian locks will alter human behaviour in any way against piracy:

Fuck you!

That's not answering the question at ALL

Time for another: Rant by Request! Also: Rant by Proxy!

Televised car ads.

These are so infuriating that a week ago my girlfriend, in lieu of throwing something at our two grand flatscreen, said "I will buy the first car that has an ad which tells you something!"

Car ads seem to come in three flavours:

1. Nice music, fancy photography, no voice-over or text which tells you anything more informative than a.) the brand, and b.) the model, both of which you need, because it was shot in a way that made it extremely difficult to differentiate that car from any other, or make out the number of doors, or work out if they were advertising a car or the horse that keeps getting in the way of the camera.
   
2. Voice-over which throws in a lot of what sounds like information, but is actually just either a.) obvious just from looking at the thing ("With a 4-wheel drive heritage") or b.) so much par for the course that only the opposite would be worth mentioning ("An optional diesel engine"), or b.) nonsense that only sounds like English but actually isn't ("Power for when you need it most")
   
3. Voice-over which attempts to swamp you with information which, if you pay close attention, you will realise is about as useful and relevant as the phrase "Part of a complete diet" or "May help prevent cancer of the left middle finger, if you're an Aquarius".

My complaint against number 1 should be fairly obvious.

Ditto number 2, which has the added sins against its name of not being faintly entertaining as a piece of video art, and insulting my intelligence.

Number 3 goes beyond insulting my intelligence and goes into an incompetent rendition of the French Knight's taunting from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.

The format essentially runs like this: "Our new Fred GS has more power than the Frankelhoffer GL, more airbags than the Dogrooter SX, more rear leg room than any of the Boxsters, a longer warranty than the Fishwife CSi...." And so on.

Which, I suppose, leads me to assume that every competitor not named in each category has a better rating, which puts the car you're advertising second last at everything, by default. And I'm hardly going to buy a car which is second last at everything important, am I?

No, if you go down the comparison route then you open yourself up to me staring at the screen and saying "Yes, but your car is ugly as shit."

About the only "comparison" that's safe is when you win an award. Car Of The Year from anybody who has a decent reputation (Wheels, the collected total of European magazines, that sort of thing). That says something. Not much, admittedly, because I doubt very much that Wheels applied the Wolfhound Test or had my attitude towards badly designed controls, but it says something.

No, I'm afraid that if you're going to say anything at all in a car ad, your options are quite limited:

• Brand
• Model
• Engine choices
• Price
• Seating and space
• Awards (but be careful. "Most likely to be stolen and used in a ram raid", for example, might not work in your favour.)
• Performance, but if you go on about 0-60 times I really will switch off. Fuel economy is good, proof of handling and ride prowess is good, saying that you are .5seconds faster to the speed limit than anyone else is irrelevant.

And that's about it.

All a dick-size competition will reveal about you is that you're insecure and trying to hide something.

All a nicely shot piece of video art says is that spent money on the advertising that should have been spent on that nasty cheap-feeling bit of plastic that covers up the fuse-box.

What is the point of running email billing like this?

Phone companies.

Can't live without them, can't burn them in effigy with any real sense of satisfaction.

I have Vodafone for my mobile, and AAPT for my home phone. Each one has a billing cycle of the calendar month. And each one waits a full week after the end of the billing cycle and making the bill available online, to tell me that my bill is available online. Which frequently means that I've paid at least one of them before they let me know about it.

Huh?

It takes a dog owner to really understand

My partner and I daily play a game called "The Wolfhound test", in which we walk or drive past any station wagon or similar load-carrying vehicle, look at it critically and ask "Can you fit Wolfhounds in that?"

We currently have three, including the puppy, and the middle aged one, who is pure-blood, is abou 32" (if I remember correctly) at the shoulder, and is pressed hard by the current Commodore wagon.

And Holden have now released a range of "Sportwagon" Commodore wagons which would barely pass a Border Collie test. Bastards!

We're thinking that we'll be stuck with a small van.

You see, here's the thing: A station wagon is for what, exactly?

Answer: Carrying big loads, and other people, while driving a vehicle with car dynamics and car comforts. A ute is okay for loads that can get wet or withstand wind, and you only have one friend. A van is okay for bigger loads that need to be covered, but you can still only have one, maybe two, friends. 

And a 4WD vehicle, of the traditional kind like a Discovery or Land Cruiser, is just plain crap.

I mean, honestly: It's too tall to have decent dynamics and braking, it's so tall that it's fucking rude to other road users, who can't see past you, which makes you dangerous, it's too heavy and with aerodynamics too crap to not drain your wallet for fuel,  and it's got a small load space anyway, because it's short because it's supposed to be able to go off-road. A 4WD has two purposes, and two only: Going heavily off-road, or revealing to the world that you're arrogant, insecure and a bit thick.

So where does that leave the big dog owner who has friends and doesn't want to leave their dogs out in the open on a dual-cab ute because they're just stupid enough to try and jump off? Commodore or Falcon, and I'm worrying about Commodore these days. Even the halfway vehicles like Subaru Outback/Forester or Volvo XC90 suffer from load spaces too short. And height-wise? 

Yep, we're going to end up with a van.

Never let the bastards know you exist.

This is really unpleasantly sneakily nasty.

I get a lot of spam at my job number 2. A lot. As in, I had spam coming in between my email address being created and my computer being configured, a process of about five minutes.

I have sent literally nobody an email using that address, because I can't access it remotely, so I just use my gmail address.

And this morning, after a week of not being here, I had 85 "spam" and 25 "junk", or thereabouts.

So I'm quite aware of spam at the moment, and then I delete one message, and get a note saying that the sender has requested a read receipt, and do I want to send one?

For those of you who may not know: Spam doesn't just get sent to legitimate addresses. It gets shot-gunned to addresses, based upon likely addresses built up out of name databases. If you ever reply, however, or in some way confirm that this address actually works, then your address goes from being a may-as-well to a very valuable commodity, and you will never be free of spam for as long as you use that account.

The good part here is that receipts like this appear to be a Microsoft invention, or at least something that I have only ever encountered using Outlook. If you use a different program, particularly a web-based system, you probably don't need to worry.

Which basically means that the most vulnerable people are those in a uniform corporate IT environment.

As they didn't already have enough pain to be going on with.

One misplaced fear, and we have very real unpleasantness

It's finally happened.

In the UK, rates of vaccination have dropped to the point where measles has reached epidemic proportions and entire schools have closed.

In the USA, measles has slipped from "nearly eradicated", where the only identified cases were from immigrants and visitors, to several hospitalisations this year.

Now, in Australia, vaccination rates have dropped to the point where the extraordinarily painfully unpleasant childhood disease whooping cough has spiked (ABC news Online).

Here's the thing: Vaccination works. Vaccination is no more 100% safe than any other medical procedure is (people with blood clotting disorder can bleed to death after taking one aspirin tablet, for example), but it has no confirmable connection with autism, which is the fear that has lead us to this mess.

Not only are individuals at risk, but we're losing herd immunity.

What do I mean by herd immunity? Vaccination is not 100% effective any more than it's 100% safe. But if most people are vaccinated, then there are so few people who are at risk of catching any particular disease - from no protection or from protection that hasn't quite taken or isn't quite good enough - that the chance of any one of them catching it reduces to the point where it probably won't happen: herd immunity. But when the number of vulnerable people increases to the point where they're in contact with each other regularly, we have an opportunity for an infection to gain a foothold. We lose the herd immunity, and this is what is happening if parents are either afraid of vaccines or can't see the point any more.

I'm just glad that my parents were medically knowledgeable and I got all mine.

Link to ABC News Online story "'Unvaccinated kids' linked to whooping cough spike".