George Takei wins the universe.

Seriously. The man is amazing.

Just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA20dKc3kK8

And the Irish government fails its citizens yet again

The Irish government refuses to fund or support the HPV vaccine Gardasil. This is the vaccine that’s already available in the US, where Texas governor Rick Perry has signed into law a provision to require girls entering the American sixth grade to receive the vaccine.*

It’s been proven safe, or as safe as you can get.

Despite the lack of government support for a vaccination programme, many young women are getting it anyway, and many mothers are going into debt to give it to their daughters. The HPV vaccine has been shown in testing to reduce the rate of cervical cancer by 80%, but if you’re Irish and want it, you’re going to have to shell out around six hundred euro.

Now, would someone please tell me why the Bertie’s hand-wringing government is being this stupid? It can’t be for financial reasons: in the long run, this vaccine will save the public health services orders of magnitude more money than it will cost them. So why the dithering?

I can’t escape feeling that if this was a vaccine for, oh, say, a virus that caused penile cancer, or some disease which only affected men, Fianna Fáil and their smarmy PD coalition partners would be bending over backwards to ensure it was available through public medecine. But, of course, since it’s only women at risk, we can bloody well pay our own way and be glad of it, until FF and the PDs get around to enriching their mates and cronies through another series of committees and commissions.

Except, of course, for the ever-increasing number of women and their daughters who live in poverty, or barely above the poverty line, and can’t afford to spend six hundred quid on anything, even a vaccine that might save their lives.

But why should the politicians worry about that? After all, they can afford to have their daughters vaccinated.

It’s just too bad for the rest of us.

*There is an opt-out provision. There is also a state-aid provision for people in poverty. In Texas. A death-penalty state. Can’t we do better than this?

An Irish, feminist, agnostic student of theology dares the Interwebs

I’ve been a long-time reader of blogs – and part-time sharer of TMI over at Livejournal – for a couple of years now, and it’s come to my attention that there appears to be a shortage of specifically Irish feminist blogs on this series of tubes we call the internets, much less Irish feminist blogs written by agnostics.

But for what does free blogging software exist, if not to let ordinary peons like you and me rectify those imbalances we see?

It’s my plan, then, to blog on whatever takes my fancy. As an Irish citizen, a feminist, an agnostic, and student both of theology and of history, I should at least amuse myself, if no one else.