The Jenny McCarthy Body Count

Everyone is entitled to their opinion and to share their opinion to everyone that they want to.  However, when you are a celebrity, for better or worse, your opinion carries more weight than the average person on the street.  Therefore, celebrities should think before they speak and should research their opinions before they relate them to the media.

Enter, Jenny McCarthy, a once minor celebrity on MTV and now a major anti-vaccination proponent.  She has a son with autism, which she attributes to childhood vaccinations.  She has appeared on Oprah numerous times since 2007 preaching the fact that vaccinations are dangerous and encouraging parents not to vaccinate their children.  Thanks to Jenny McCarthy and people like her, the rate of vaccination in the US and other developed countries has fallen to levels where previously rare diseases are making a comeback.  Jenny McCarthy has a body count to her name.

Oprah, you don’t get away scott free either.  You have given this quack a platform to preach her dangerous ideas to millions of parents worldwide. You  don’t offer any other viewpoint nor do you challenge her views.  Shame on you.

Come Celebrate The Demonic Harvest

It both amuses and appals me when some Christians make shit up in an attempt to try to prove how their god is so much better than anyone else’s.  This article by Kimberly Davies called The Danger of Celebrating Halloween fell into the amusing category cause it is so out there that the fact that anyone could believe this nonsense is mind boggling.
She writes

The word “holiday” means “holy day.” But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is “hallow,” which means “holy, consecrated and set apart for service.” If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

And it just gets better from there on in.

She comes up with gems like

Most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

and

During this season witches are celebrating the changing of the seasons from summer to fall. They give praise to the gods for the demonic harvest.

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) originally published this article on their site, but now appear to feel differently about promoting this idiotic nonsense as this article has since been removed.  However, thanks to the caching powers of Google, we can still enjoy it in all its entirety.  Thanks Google!

Curious Minds: A Day Off

My life has gotten extremely hectic lately.  My weekends are packed with things to do and people to see and my weeknights seemed to be filled with playing catch up of all the household duties that didn’t get done over the weekend.  I am feeling stressed out and exhausted.  I am dreaming of having a whole week off from life to rest and relax, even just one day with nothing planned and nothing around the house to do would be heaven. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have even a spare day until about December.

Therefore, to aid me in dreaming about the perfect day off, I have the following question for all of you.

If you could spend a whole day doing exactly as you wished with no demands and no responsibilities, what would you do?

Completely Unexpected

For those of you who are new to reading this blog and don’t really know anything about me,  I have been doing Kung Fu for the past 7 months.  I have my brown belt which  is equivalent to your yellow belt in Karate i.e it is the belt you get after your first grading.  I am very much a raw beginner.  Today was my third tournament (my second one being just last weekend) and I was signed up to compete in Beginners/Intermediate Soft Traditional Forms.  However, due to not many people signing up for this event (I was the only one), they combined it with Advanced/Black Belt.  This meant that in this competition I would be competing against people who had been doing martial arts for years, which was really not fair.  My instructor lodged a bit of complaint and got me moved to the Beginners/Intermediate Hard Form division instead.  However, this division had already started their competition by the time this all got organised, so with no warm up or run through of my form, I went and competed.  Out of a field of 10 competitors, I came third, which completely shocked and totally amused me as my kata felt nowhere near as solid as I could perform it.

What was even more amusing, was that I was competing at the AMAC Australian Titles, which featured the best martial artists competing on the AMAC circuit in Australia.  Not really sure how I pulled that one off.  I must admit I am left wondering how I might have done if I had warmed up first, still I am more than happy with third place and my rather big trophy.

On the left hand side is my 3rd place AMAC Australian Titles trophy and on the right hand side is my 1st place AMAC Round 4 Beginners Traditional Hard Form trophy

Descending Into Madness

November 1st is the beginning of the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) where the aim is to post at least one blog post every single day for the entire month of November – that is 30 posts in 30 days.  For the third year in a row I have signed up for NaBloPoMo after swearing every year never to do it ever again.  I fool myself into thinking that this will instill in me good blog posting habits for the rest of the year.  This year is no exception.

Therefore from the 1st November, there will be a brand new blog post for you every single day.  If you don’t want to miss them, then subscribe to my RSS feed.  :)  I hope I can come up with really interesting topics to post about every day, but if there is anything you want me to cover, then let me know either in the comments section or through the Contact Me page.

Music Break: Cover Songs

Cover Songs – they can either be done really well or sound absolutely dreadful, yet many artists take the risk that their interpretation of a famous song won’t fall into the latter category.

This morning, I found this amazing cover version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, performed by one of my favourite musicians Imogen Heap and I think it is just gorgeous.  What is your opinion?

Note the video just plays the music, no images so don’t be disturbed by seeing just a black screen.

I also love Alanis Morisette’s cover of King of Pain

What are you favourite cover songs??  Post links if they are on You Tube or LastFM as I would love to hear them.

The Latest Round in the Vaccination War

Tensions have flared once again between those that support vaccinations and those that oppose them with the publication in WIRED magazine of an article by Amy Wallace entitled “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.  This well researched article which is part interview with vaccine co-inventor Paul Offit and part vaccine history lesson has the anti-vaccination fringe all upset.  They are so upset in fact that J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, an anti-vaccine group has written in the blog Age of Autism a commentary piece originally entitled “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.” which has now been toned down to just ” Wired Magazine and Amy Wallace Drink Paul Offit’s Kool-Aid”.   The line ‘the roofie cocktails at Paul Offit’s house must be damn good’ has been removed and now Amy is just innocently sipping Paul’s kool-aid rather than being date-raped.

It is interesting to see that a female journalist who writes a scientific piece that others disagree with has sexual references made about her whilst male journalists usually just get their credibility called into question.  In fact this point has been taken up by Abel Pharmboy in his insightful post, “When critics disagree with me, I’m a Pharma Shill.  When critics disagree with a woman it gets sexual.” The sexual name calling doesn’t stop with Handley’s horrible article, unfortunately.  Amy has received many letters in which is called a prostitute, a whore and other even more terrible things after the publication of her article.  She has now started twittering sections of letters both in support of and opposing her article.   Bastard Sheep has done and excellent job chronicling her tweets and putting them in a more readable format.  They are compelling reading.

For those interested in reading a great opinion piece about the tensions that have flared up over Wallace’s article, check out Science-Based Medicine’s post, “The effectiveness wordsmithing of Amy Wallace”.

For me, as someone new to the vaccination information war, this latest ‘battle’ has been very eye-opening in terms of how each side presents their arguments and responds to arguments from the other side.  As someone who has a science degree, I am always going to find solid scientific facts much more compelling than hearsay and personal anecdotes.  However, the behaviour of the anti-vaccination groups has made me realise that if the only way you can try to win a fight is to resort to name calling and other dirty tactics then you must not hold a lot of faith that your arguments can stand up to critical analysis.

Nicknames

Today’s Afternoon Inquisitor question on Skepchick today was about nicknames and how you got your nickname.  This made me realise  that I don’t have a nickname. My name Meg is already the shorten version of my legal name and besides the horrible Megsy, which I won’t tolerate anyone calling me, there is not much one can do to Meg.  Also I haven’t done anything, embarrassing or otherwise, to earn myself a non-name related nickname.

Is there anyone else out there as boring as I am who doesn’t have a nickname or do the rest of you live such exciting lives that you have not only one nickname but a whole host of them??