Section 59 of the AVN vs. HCCC judgement (emphasis mine): 59 Although I find that both complaints concern the health service that the plaintiff provides, the health service has not been shown to “affect the clinical management or care of an individual client”. Although it might have that tendency, and although the plaintiff hopes to have that effect, I do not consider this to be sufficient to establish that it has had that effect. Translation: "The AVN is desperately trying to come under the jurisdiction of the act, but I see no evidence that it's actually succeeded in that attempt". Isn't that a...

Hello visitors from The Northern Star and other sites. The Stop the AVN FB hub is here, and the public site here   This morning judgement was handed down in the AVN vs HCCC, a case which Stop The AVN has of course been following closely. The AVN won. But is it as simple as that? Well, it seems it's not that simple. I am most emphatically not a lawyer, but I've been sitting here reading over the text of the judgement. While the AVN may have won, it most certainly hasn't won. What? OK. give me a moment here. The judgement deals in detail with the matters...

I was a teenager in the early 90s, at a time when the UK's rave culture was still alive and kicking, though on the wane. In those days, after police crackdowns and legal changes to suppress the culture, raves were often held at secret locations. Sometimes, for the good ones, the location would be a warehouse, or an aircraft hangar or a farmer's barn. Often, though, the location would be a rented marquee in a muddy field two miles down a dirt road, where the best you could fervently hope for was that someone had at least made a makeshift dancefloor from stolen forklift pallets. Sometimes ravers...

It's "<person> and <person> commented on a post in which you were tagged" You're welcome, Facebook. You can send me a cheque post-haste. Or some stock.

Quoth the dingbat: Hi Jason After a long day out yesterday, I returned to find an alert from a friend. They directed me to your blog and, it seems, the source of the 'innumerate dingbat' call. Well, Greg, I'm not actually sure whether I originated the comment. I just liked it very much. It's so... apt. I see you've had a go at my maths and concluded "Yes, Greg, you're an Innumerate Dingbat. You're just going to have to learn to live with it." Well, live with it I will, Jason. After all, you seem intent on sticking with the name, and you're free...

I've written before on the topic of percentages, and more specifically the inability of many people to correctly employ, disseminate and understand them. A striking example of this failure has cropped up recently on the Australian Vaccination Network's Facebook page, a well-known venue for such failures. This post links to an article on the website of one Greg Beattie, an antivax parent who tried, and failed, to take on the Australian Human Rights and Opportunities Commission, on the topic of the right to refuse non-vaccinated children admission to childcare. Greg is no smarter than Meryl Dorey when it comes to numbers It appears that...

Have a quick look at this pair of tweets These are emblematic of a major problem in the world of vaccine/antivaccine. We're dealing with genuine cases of harm and death. Over here on the pro-vaccine side, we try hard to be sensitive to grief, not always successfully, but occasionally something like this crops up and it's very hard to fight back because of a societal taboo against intruding on the grief of others. Of course, this doesn't seem to apply in the case of Meryl Dorey, whose activities around Dana McCaffery's tragic death are well documented, however this case is slightly different. The person...

Sometimes you just have to ask what planet antivaxers live on. Take for instance, this post over at the AVN Facebook page, a letter from "CC", which illustrates the archetypal introspection-free hypocrisy and glaring inconsistency of the antivax lobby. Here's the bit I'd like to highlight first: OK, well, if that's true, that would be a bad thing. After all, the pro-vaccination side in this debate prides itself on rational analysis of the facts and figures, and regularly calls out the antivax side for its emotion-based, gut-feeling mode of thought* So imagine my surprise when reading on, I started to see appeals to emotion...