Nina @ pitas

Howard has not "mis-spoken" the truth so greviously since he promised, eight years ago, "never ever" to introduce a GST. He has never believed in Medicare. Neither has the Coalition. They have been committed to its destruction as a universal health insurance scheme ever since the Whitlam opposition promised the scheme 31 years ago.

Sometimes I think it would all be so much better if a great big rock hit the planet and we all died.

Coz really, really, really... all these loonies in power... we'd be better off dead.

A Japanese scientist could soon become stinking rich with an invention to be ready by 2005 that would use Panda dung to create electricity.

Heheh. Good idea. :)

Damn, pitas seems to be down. As does half the rest of the web (where I go, anyway). It's probably my ISP fucking up again. Grrr.

Thank goodness for Notepad.

Consumers, retailers and suppliers panicked yesterday amid confusion following Monday's decision to recall 219 Pan-branded products and to ban the company from making thousands of medicines for other companies for six months. The move came after Pan was caught falsifying test results and substituting ingredients in its products.

Consumer groups, the natural health care industry, and Pan itself accused the Therapeutic Goods Administration of botching its announcement of the recall by giving no prior warning. Instead, it gave a blanket alert to stop taking vitamins and herbal supplements until further notice.

I've checked my shelves (not that I take much in the way of supplements) and the only thing I need to toss is a bottle of garlic pills. Phew.

It is not the first time that Pan Pharmaceuticals or its founder, Jim Selim, have fallen foul of authorities. In 1976 Mr Selim appeared before the Pharmacy Board of NSW charged with professional misconduct.

The charge - failing to include a substance in a manufactured item - related to his making of paracetamol tablets. Some batches contained no paracetamol.

Perhaps this time he can be shut down for good?

Mr Shackell, a psychologist from Koroit, in Victoria, had never had a problem with the tablets before and assumed he had developed an oversensitivity to them. When he checked his symptoms in a reference book he realised his reaction was consistent with an overdose.

It was not until he heard news reports that he learned the Therapeutic Goods Administration had suspended Pan Pharmaceuticals' licence for six months and ordered the immediate withdrawal of 219 of its products - including Travacalm.

It's not like the TGA is overreacting to one or a handful of unrelated cases - there's been a lot of this going on.

Pan has had its manufacturing licence suspended, in part because the concentrations of ingredients in its products were found to fluctuate wildly and its processes allowed ingredients from one batch on the production line to slip into unrelated products.

More here, here, here and here.

For years now, one small branch of science has been chipping away at the foundations of religious belief by proposing that "otherworldly" experiences are nothing more than the inner workings of the human brain. Many neuroscientists claim they can locate and explain brain functions that produce everything from religious visions to sensations of bliss, timelessness or union with a higher power.

Given that we are a long long way from understanding exactly how the brain works (in all its myriad functions) I have never understood why there "must be" a God.

These claims have been strengthened by the work of the Canadian neuropsychologist Dr Michael Persinger. By stimulating the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, Persinger has been able to induce in hundreds of subjects a "sensed presence" only the subjects themselves are aware of. This presence, Persinger suggests, may be described as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad or the Sky Spirit - depending on the name the subject's culture has trained him or her to use.

"Neurotheology", as this line of inquiry has been dubbed, has its critics. Some say it fails to distinguish between experiences that contain a moral or spiritual dimension (such as visions of God) from those that don't (such as ghostly perceptions). Others point out that none of this research can ever establish whether our brains have been designed to apprehend religious experiences or whether these are simply the by-product of bad wiring.

Hah. :) I probably have bad wiring. But I'd rather have bad wiring and be an atheist, tyvm.

...I could gambol (and it would be quite all right).

[A] study has shown that people who narrowly miss out on a big loss while gambling go on to risk more than those who miss out on a jackpot.

The research, published in the 'Journal of Experimental Social Psychology', indicates people hold misconceptions about luck. Getting problem gamblers to recognise such false beliefs is a crucial step in their treatment.

I am a problem gambler. An on-again, off-again problem gambler. Keep me away from those machines... but don't. If I feel like a punt you should let me... but stop me when I've lost more than I put in. But not when I'm drunk or I'm likely to slug you.

I have a problem.

I am my own worst enemy.

Consumers have been warned not to take any vitamins or herbal supplements, and even to check the label of common headache pills, amid the biggest medical product recall in Australian history.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) yesterday banned 219 products, ranging from vitamin C to cough syrup - and is considering laying criminal charges as it continues an investigation into Pan Pharmaceuticals, the country's largest contract manufacturer of alternative medicines.

The TGA has already uncovered falsification of test results and substitution of ingredients, and says further recalls could amount to 70 per cent of "complementary" medicines sold here.

Eeeeeeeeeeek!

From being originally a defensive tool, it has become an offensive weapon and, increasingly, a sexual, cultural and political symbol embraced by artists, poets and sculptors, and adopted by organisations as diverse as Amnesty International and the Benetton clothing company. It is also collectable, debatable and fashionable.

With little education, no understanding of their rights, and no money, these girls have no ability to protest and little practical option but to work for the "mommas" who run the brothels. After all, once the brothel owners have paid for a girl, they will not readily let her go before they have turned a profit on their investment. Gangs of thugs outside the clubs discourage the girls from attempting to flee. And if they do leave, the girls know they will be followed home and punished.

Natasha Ryan, the Queensland teenager who went into hiding for more than four years, believes she deserves to go to jail.

The 18-year-old told Channel Nine's 60 Minutes she had not had the guts to come out of hiding and did not realise what her family had gone through.

"I do believe I deserve to go to jail. I do not want to go to jail. [But] I do deserve to be severely punished for what I have done," she said after first joking "a boot up the bum" would be the appropriate punishment.

Hel-lo..???

She's just spent four years hiding from the world, rarely going outside at all, she's pretty much totally clueless about everything... so in what way is locking her up going to help?

Rehabilitation, of some sort, and counselling (for all parties). Not incarceration.

"I am sick of editing," said the great Russian director. "Let's not be afraid of time."

And so he conceived of a film that dispenses with editing and treats time as real and inviolate, two things movies almost never do. Therefore it had to be done in a single take, and he wanted it to run 90 minutes, which was impossible.

Nils told me about this in a half-hearted attempt to persuade me to see it with him. Normally I do not, ever, read film reviews (regardless of whether I intend to see it at some point), but given that Nils' description sounded insane (and slightly incoherent) I thought maybe I'd better.

So, hmmm. I think if I'm going to see it at all I'll have to see it on my own, or maybe with my sister (who speaks a little Russian). Seeing it with Nils would just spoil it for me.

Dieting before and during pregnancy may be harming unborn children, according to researchers who have found even a modest reduction in nutrition around the time of conception could cause premature births.

Sheesh. We need research to tell us this stuff?

*rolls eyes*

"Andrew rang me and said 'I'm going back to England to take care of business'. I was not sure what he meant. When a friend told me he was done for murder, I didn't believe it. It was completely out of character."

This being Andrew Aiken, one of the artists responsible for the Martin Luther King mural in Newtown. Seems the desired refurbishment is hindered by his absence, and also by a dispute of ownership (Telstra vs the guy who owns the shop on the outside wall of which the mural is painted). Interesting...

It has been called the king of nuts, its sweet, succulent kernel packed with "good" (cholesterol-free) oil, fibre and vitamin E. So why does the Australian macadamia nut - the only plant indigenous to our continent that is widely farmed for food - account for less than 2 per cent of the nuts consumed around the world?

John Underhill, operations manager for one of Australia's biggest macadamia growers, says the problem people have been wrestling with for nearly a century has been extracting the meat in one piece from its shell. Engineers say it takes a force of 400 kilograms - nearly half a tonne - to crack a macca.

Ouch!

On a recent Saturday evening at the Budapest Operetta Theatre, the cast of the curious hit German musical 'Mozart!' are milling backstage at interval, some in powdered wigs and court dress, others got up like Russian rock stars.

...since the Russians pulled out in 1989, the Hungarian Government has continued to heavily fund arts companies...

'Mozart!' is ... an astonishingly elaborate musical in which Mozart is played as a crotch-grabbing rock god (sung in Hungarian with English surtitles).

Heee! I'd like to see that! :)

I'm not a huge fan but cannot fail to notice the news that Catherine Zeta Jones has had a girl - Carys. :)

Except she's also having some bad press for smoking while pregnant. :(

Why did the Howard Government change child-care funding arrangements in such a way that child-care centres in low-income areas were forced to close? Why is Australia one of only two developed countries (along with the US) with no paid maternity leave scheme?

Why, indeed. For the same reason that Howard introduced the baby bonus. The deeply conservative PM wants to social-engineer a situation in which most women with young children will stay out of the workforce. He does not recognise that no amount of policy tinkering will create this situation for most Australian families.

Here's a better one - why did we elect the c*nt in the first place??

I fell asleep at the desk. I have the imprint of the bottom of the keyboard on my forehead. I am so tired. I am so so so tired. It doesn't make sense. I went to bed about 10.30 last night and didn't get up til about 9 this morning (someone rang the doorbell at around 8am but I ignored it and went back to sleep). I'm so tired and I don't know why. All I want to do, really, is go back to bed and sleep all day. That's all I want to do. This is bad.

Los Angeles: On his website John Weinhart bills himself as running a retirement home for big cats once used by the entertainment industry. But what officials found at his home this week was more like a mortuary.

On his property on Tuesday they found about 30 dead animals, most of them large cats like tigers, with 58 cubs also dead in a freezer. Among the living they found 11 baby cats - nine tigers and two leopards - estimated to be just 10 to 14 days old in a crawl space and another two young tigers outside. In the bath were two alligators.

That's just not nice. :(

Obesity is a far bigger factor in causing cancer than scientists first thought, with fat believed to cause 20 per cent of cancers in women and 14 per cent in men.

A United States study which tracked 900,000 people aged over 16 found obesity significantly increased a person's risk of dying from almost all types of cancer.

I need to eat more vegetables...

"Everybody realises there is a huge learning period for children from zero to 18 months, but nobody is making anything for them," Hit Entertainment's owner, Peter Orton, says. "Those kids are like sponges at that age, and there's a great opportunity there. That might scare people, but it is a very interesting area."

For the past six years, marketers who specialise in targeting children as young as three have gathered at an annual conference called Kidpower. This year's conference, to be held in Sydney in July, will feature commentary on children's trends, the creation of customer loyalty through membership programs and the pursuit of growing market share through brand extensions. The Kidpower program says the conference will discuss issues such as "the role of music for children under five" and provide insights into success stories, such as a marketing campaign which helped a range of dolls become the "hottest-selling items to girls aged three to eight".

Which just makes me extremely relieved not to be a parent. Ugh.

Lost adults can find each other by using a message board. But neither the lost person's centre nor the four adults, three mobile phones, medication and child harness were enough to preserve the sanity yesterday of Aunt Melly, the volunteer child minder. "If I ever say I'll do this again, just shoot me," she says.

Kim Beazley has set the stage for a Labor leadership challenge after a day of open hostility with Simon Crean, who accused him of disloyalty.

Senior Labor figures expect that moves to dump Mr Crean as the party's federal leader in favour of Mr Beazley will climax within weeks, most likely after the federal budget on May 13.

Supporters of the former Labor leader, who argue that the ALP will suffer a catastrophic election defeat if Mr Crean continues in the job, will now try to convince Mr Beazley that he can no longer remain on the sidelines and must promote himself openly. One Beazley supporter said: "The door is open. We are moving towards running against Crean."

Another said: "If Beazley can be persuaded to challenge, and get some blood on his hands, a lot of the stuff about him having no guts will dissipate overnight."

Dammit, can't they just play nicely together?? Get rid of Howard first, then worry about who's going to lead the party...

Campbell claimed the Good Shepherd Sisters (and by implication the entire Australian Catholic hierarchy) were involved in a major racket. His paper hinted at babies born in convents and girls in the laundries being killed off or dying from exhaustion and being buried in "strange places".

Actually, that wouldn't surprise me at all.

The last of the convent laundries closed in the 1970s. The former "laundry slaves" have met with mixed fortunes. Many have been in jail, a few have committed suicide, others have prospered.

And so I should be grateful for what I have.

Wars come and go, but the sick are always with us. The Medicare thingy again, in other words.

There is a sense of unreality about Howard's attitude to Medicare. In the 1980s he described Medicare as "a total disaster", "a human nightmare" and a "miserable, cruel fraud". Less than a decade later he spoke like a convert: "We're not going to contemplate altering the universality of Medicare ... that is fundamental and we're also going to keep bulk-billing," he said after retrieving the Opposition leadership in 1995.

And he gave us GST, too - let's not forget that.

(Gosh, a tax we didn't want, a war we didn't want... and now he's going to fuck with Medicare? Think I'll move to Finland...)

The Howard view of what constitutes Medicare's universality is universal availability of the rebate, which he proposes to retain. Labor says the fundamental principle of Medicare was to ensure medical services were available according to medical need, not a patient's capacity to pay.

Yes, and those least able to pay are often those most in need of treatment.

If it works, the recrafting of Medicare as a safety net system will mean higher medical costs for a rising number of patients. And that means Howard's battlers, those on low incomes who do not qualify for concessions.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot - "the little Aussie battler". Take a hike, Johnny.

girlwithaspirin.com - which I could just look at and look at and look at. Except I know I'm supposed to click stuff...

*savouring the moment*

And some people do it well.

But let's not forget all the hundreds of thousands who don't, can't, won't and never will.

Yes, Kenzie, I'm talking to YOU.

*smirks behind hand*

Kidding, kidding. *smooch*

There, kissed you all better.

Happy birthday Kenzie. =)

(And you thought I'd forget, eh?)

Cootiehog - with the most delicious orange/yellow design I've seen in a long long time. Kinda tempted to steal that background, too... but only for my desktop. ^_^

Is that a penguin? Funny-looking penguin.

Sexy domain name, though. :)

12% Beer is an experiment to see if funky writing, and a sickening love of monkeys, when distilled and concentrated into one website, can conquer the hearts and souls of the population of the Earth. This will mainly be accomplished by quoting and linking entertaining diaries on Diaryland.

Right. Because I was wondering...

Random find: minderella - beautiful layout, engaging writing, but, uh, me no speak French, so I'm pissed off at the rudeness inherent in the primary navigation, in that I don't know what "d'antan", for example, means, and the status bar doesn't tell me anything useful (or in fact, at all). I call that browser abuse. Thank goodness I'm not reviewing the thing.

Gah. I have spent all afternoon on this. Since about 1pm when Nils rang to remind me to buy vegetables (shhh). Some of the positioning was just driving me batshit. Eventually I gave up on being validatory/compliant and used a couple of table thingies (shhhhhh). And then some of those fucked up the layer-y bits and I had to take them away again and start over.

So really, I'm not that happy with it but it'll do for the time being. Definitely needs more tweaking, or else it'll be another layout next time I archive...

A mathematics professor spent three days trapped under a pile of books in his apartment in Zagreb before being saved by a neighbour who heard his cries for help.

I shouldn't laugh - it could easily happen to me one day. ^_^

I still haven't finished the new layout. I've had some positioning problems, basically. z-index thingies not working like they're s'posed to. Grrrr.

But I archived anyway in the hope that I might actually get the new layout done soon (er, today?) and slap it on here...

It was gonna be purple, now it's green. Kinda green-grey. It's meant to be soothing and calming (as opposed to the violent-ness of the pink, ugh).

Whyever did I use pink when I don't even like pink much? The only colour I dislike more than pink is red. Ugh.

Yeah, anyway.

I've been bouncing around diary review sites (mostly on diaryland) and doing much faux-puking at the hypocrisy and such (eg sites that say "if you don't make your own design we won't review you" and yet they are using someone else's design. omg).

Anyway. Here's a favourites export (all the review sites I've bookmarked so far)...

Which is really quite a lot, huh. :)