Vaccinate that puppy every year?

A little ball of fluff

Regular readers may recall my piece about the passing of our much loved little mate while we were away for our holiday by the beach, well after a respectful time we have made some effort to find a new family hound. Now it would have been easy to rescue some undoubtedly loveable mutt from the pound or just to have bought the first cute looking ball of fluff that came our way. I was even offered, gratis, a Labrador retriever who had developed a taste for domestic poultry. But that offer fell through when the dog’s owner decided to keep her out of the hen house rather than give her away.
After much thought we as a family decided that it would be better to stick with the breed that we know and love. This meant that I had to do the ringing around the small circle of people who do “our” breed. having been on the other end of this conversation so many times it was strange to be the one seeking a pup. In the first instance we had to decide which gender we wanted and I put the argument to my beloved wife that a dog tends to be more loyal to its master than a bitch. My wife and daughter won and we decided to get a bitch this time. Eventually I found a breeder who has some pups and we will be collecting ours on the 19th of February. Our little ball of fluff is costing more money than I want to talk about and everyone here is getting quite excited as each day passes and the special day approaches. The breeder has kept us updated and she was even happy to ensure that the name that we have picked will be the one that appears on the pedigree.When we collect our little ball of fluff she will be eight weeks old and she will have already had her first vaccination, the booster at twelve weeks should provide her with protection from the most common and deadly canine maladies. All of this stuff is running around my head so I of course noticed  the piece that I quote below:

Research by pet industry lobby group the Australian Companion Animal Council has found that it costs $746 a year to keep the family pooch and $583 for a cat.

Australia has one of the world’s highest pet ownership rates, with almost two-thirds of people owning at least one pet.

Australian Veterinary Association president Mark Lawrie said his organisation updated its policy last year to recommend vaccinations be conducted every three years.

“It’s vital that people still get kittens and puppies done. As with people, vaccines save many lives,” Dr Lawrie said.

He said all vets were aware of the association’s policy.

It had always struck me as rather strange that vaccines that we use in humans generally impart a life long immunity to the disease that they target but that the vaccines for diseases in dogs had to be redone annually, now it seems that my suspicions may have been correct.  It may now be policy to advocate vaccination every three years but I will be interetsed to see if that is the message that I get when I take our little girl in for her 12 week jabs.

Cheers Comrades

“These people are not in the same game as the West, they want to lift their standard of living, and they will not be assisting in carbon abatement.”

I don’t know why but it seems that old Labor war horses keep writing opinions that I tend to agree with The opinion piece by Gary Johns in today’s Australian is a good case in point, I have been saying loud and long that right or wrong that the science can not overcome the politics when it comes to climate change. I had to ask my correspondent JM many times if he thought that his “solution” could be made to happen and although he eventually claimed that it could, the fact that it took many attempts and that his admission was most grudging really suggests that his belief in the possibility of mitigation is at best window dressing and if he actually believes it in his heart of hearts I would be most surprised.
Anyway I commend the opinion piece that I quote below.

The further debate will have to debunk the old adage that delaying change will be more costly.

This adage is just plain wrong. New technologies will not be adopted unless they are cheaper than current technologies. The reason why politicians subsidise the most expensive low carbon options, like wind turbines and solar panels, is that people mistake low carbon for low cost abatement.

Also, these boutique non-solutions are not a huge budget cost (just a considerable waste of money).

Sure, there is a risk to the environment in waiting for the technology to catch up, but that won’t change the minds of several billion Chinese, Indians, Indonesians and South Americans.

These people are not in the same game as the West, they want to lift their standard of living, and they will not be assisting in carbon abatement.

If in future historians of public policy dig through the entrails of climate change they will find a fascinating combination of millenarianism, ego-driven scientists, business that preferred to use the environment as a sales device, a propensity by governments to allow NGOs to get too close to the policy process, a media that mistook stunts for debate, lying former politicians, and current politicians who wanted to ride the hero’s wave, retiring before their purported policies bore no fruit.

There is good science and there is good economics, they each need time to guide the way. The job of the politician in this debate is to buy time.

Gary Johns

As I have been saying here for some time when the politics demonstrate that the solution can not be made to happen the time has come to learn to live with what is coming, because to do otherwise is to waste effort and treasure in a noble but futile exercise in climate piety.

Cheers Comrades

My bold in the Quote BTW

Tony’s plan: a good each way bet

Having an each way bet

When it comes to major changes to our entire economy I think that that part of the Hippocratic oath taken by each doctor which says “firstly do no harm” should apply, and one thing that is clear about Brother Number One’s plan is that it would certainly do major harm to the pocket book of every citizen who uses any kind of energy and has to find the $1100 each year that the CPRS is estimated to cost them. And that is before we even consider the harm that empowering a whole new cohort of spivs and swindlers to trade in the permits that would be created under the CPRS. Worse still , as I have pointed out before the chances of the CPRS actually making a scrap of difference to the emissions form Australia is very low indeed.

Mr Abbott proposes no cap and therefore no compensation.

Instead, he would create a $2.5bn fund to provide incentives for industry and farmers to reduce emissions through measures such as storing carbon in soil.

An Abbott government would plant 20 million trees by 2020, covering an area equivalent to 10km by 20km. It would also provide $1000 rebates to home owners for solar cells. And it would investigate ways to bury powerlines, allowing for more urban tree planting.

Mr Abbott said his proposed plan would have the same start-up date as the CPRS – July next year – and would also achieve the 5 per cent carbon reduction proposed by Mr Rudd, but the Opposition Leader’s target is based on 1990 levels, whereas the government’s base-level year is 2000.

[...]

Business groups including the Minerals Council, the Retailers Association and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry welcomed the plan, backing the view that it made little sense to adopt carbon trading without similar schemes being used overseas.

As Mr Abbott was releasing his plan at least 1500 farmers marched on parliament to protest against restrictions on land use that they said were linked to climate change.

When Mr Abbott and Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce outlined the new policy to farmers they received solid cheers. The National Farmers Federation also applauded the plan.

As far as I can see all of these measures can have benefits even if the fears from the Gaia devotees are wrong about the anthropogenic causes of the claimed planetary warming.

For instance storing carbon in our  soils can only improve the fecundity of our agriculture and planting more trees can invigorate the environment and provide a resource for future use , while we are on trees I applaud the suggestion that we could do more to remove overhead power lines and thus allow more urban tree planting. There would of course be another upside to this and that is a reduction in the number of times that people have a loss of supply every time there is a bit of wild weather which is what happens regularly around here every storm season It might even help prevent bush fires like the ones we saw around this time last year.

My regular commenter PKD sought to tease me in the comments yesterday by suggesting :

Looks like you’re stuck without a political party to support your denialsim…although give Tony a week, and I’m sure he’ll do another climate change backflip again!!!

PKD

But I think that his own Warminista faith has blinded PKD to the versatility  of  the opposition plan, in the first instance it seeks to encourage greater efficiency in the way that we use energy (which will reduce emissions) and secondly it will have direct effects upon the measures it encompasses.thirdly it is a “do no harm” option that will have benefits even if the whole AGW house of cards completely collapses as many ardent sceptics are expecting. By contrast the Government scheme creates great opportunities to churn huge amounts of money from its “Great Big Tax” enriching a whole swag of spivs and swindlers in the process and its likely hood of making any difference to our emissions is in fact very small indeed. Small enough to be in the winning the lottery territory in fact. Further the government policy has the problem that it certainly will do harm to our economy if they are wrong about the science. If you want to use a racing analogy Tony Abbott is making a prudent each way bet on the “carbon stakes” where as the Rudd Wong syndicate are putting all of their cash on a rank outsider to win when that nag has a definite limp.

Hmm, I know which horse has better odds of going the distance.

Cheers Comrades

Even the faux outrage about Tony’s advice for his daughters has not made a dent in the trend away from our beloved leader.

It is better to be ascending than falling down

Yeah, I know that these surveys are incredibly unreliable and have a very big margin for error but this is the second one in a row which show a decline in the fortunes of Brother Number One and a rise in the approval of Tony Abbott. Even the faux outrage about Tony’s hypothetical advice for his daughters has not made a significant dent in the trend away from our beloved leader.

According to the latest Newspoll survey, conducted last weekend exclusively for The Australian, the Liberal Party’s primary vote rose three percentage points to 37 per cent – its highest since the election; the Coalition’s vote was 41 per cent compared with Labor’s unchanged 40 per cent two weeks ago. Although the primary vote difference is within the margin of error, it is the first time the Coalition has been in front of Labor on primary vote, and the two-party-preferred margin is the equal closest since 2007.

Mr Rudd’s personal standing has continued to fall, with his satisfaction rating dropping two points to 50 per cent last weekend – a decline of nine percentage points since the start of November; dissatisfaction jumped four points to 38 per cent, his highest level as Prime Minister.

While the Coalition vote rose, dissatisfaction with the Leader of the Opposition rose four points to 39 per cent reflecting a six point rise in dissatisfaction among females following Mr Abbott’s comments on virginity.

[...]

Since Mr Abbott replaced Mr Turnbull in December and dumped Liberal support for Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the Copenhagen talks collapsed, Labor’s primary vote has fallen three points, its two-party preferred vote has fallen four points and dissatisfaction with Mr Rudd has risen six points to a high of 38 per cent.

The collapse of the Warminista orthodoxy (with regular revelations of ever more problems about the veracity of the IPCC) and the, failure of the Copenhagen farce, the sparing of Australia from the spivs by the courageous Libs who stood up to Turnbull’s emasculating support for Brother Number One’s CPRS are all in play here and I for on will be very interested to see if the opposition will continue to enjoy this trend once we have the return of the parliament.
Cheers Comrades

Stop apologising for being cantankerous and embrace your inner grump, for the sake of humanity.

Well that explains it!

As I have got older I have become somewhat more grumpy, You know I get just a bit more steamed when things don’t go right. I have tried my darnedest to be even tempered in the face of adversity and thanks to a (still) rather high flash point (which I put down to the application of Yoga breathing) I have managed to avoid actually descending into any spittle dripping rants to anyone who matters in my life. I suppose that my grumpiness is well controlled  and more expressed in sarcasm  than in rage  but this report suggest that being cranky is a sign of a more advanced nature.

Researchers now believe that being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature.

A more childlike attitude to behaviour such as tolerance and sharing, could, in contrast, be an indication of not being as developed, the new study suggests.

The news will be welcomed by those who are known to operate on a short fuse, such as talented but foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay and businessman Sir Alan Sugar.

It could also provide scientific weight to the writer George Bernhard Shaw’s famous saying that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.

So all of those namby-pamby vegetation peaceniks are obviously not the way forward for humanity it is the cranky and aggressive people that drive progress and we  should stop apologising for being cantankerous and embrace our inner grump, for the sake of humanity.

If you don’t like it then you can bugger off and hug a cabbage

Cheers Comrades!!!