Sikamikanico Blogs

My travelling companion, Stampy.  I blame The Strokes.  The NYC rockers famously broke through with their 2001 debut album Is This It and were hailed as the saviours of rock. (Although they weren’t even nominated for Best New Act at the Grammys, rather proving Homer Simpson’s views on the matter ). At the time I didn't want to know. There was tonnes of great rock out of Australia in those days, I was wary of fads, and most of all a bit of trauma in my personal life months before had left me uninterested in new music. When YOLO came out in 2006, I loved the song but didn't know it was by The Strokes for ages and when I eventually found out, I still didn’t seek out any of their music (too busy lying facedown on the floor listening to Triptych by the Tea Party). It wasn't until I heard their new cut Why Are Sundays So Depressing on the radio in 2020 and realised yes, this is exactly the song I need right now, and I went on an obsessive deep dive of everything the band had eve

Drug Free Australia sound like a stand up bunch of people on the face of it. Keeping kids from trying drugs until they're no longer so child like is a noble aim, I think we could all agree, even if in one's most exhausted, stressed out moments of parenthood the desire to sedate your kids has briefly flashed across your mind.  But for the peak body Drug Free Australia, that may be the only noble thing about them. Problematic doesn't even begin to describe this lot. They peddle pseudo scientific nonsense about the dangers of drugs, partner with organisations that have been labelled  brutal, unscientific and based on human exploitation  and have stated that gay people should be laughed at and ridiculed *. Most disturbing of all however is that DFA heavily leans into the Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros covertly runs the world . Yikes, who are these people? You don't have to go far beyond the face of it to see that these people aren't on the level. The f

Not content with taking away women's rights to decide what happens to their own bodies, the GOP are determined to strip the rights of children and young people as well. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a federal district court Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, has upheld a lawsuit brought by local Republican official Alexander Deanda challenging Title X , which provides contraceptive access for low income people, including those under 18, on the grounds it "violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children". Deanda believes it is his right to prevent his children from accessing contraception, as he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” Deanda, whose lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, helped write the Texas law that allows anyone to sue a person who aids or abets an abortio

You can't go a day on the internet without seeing someone invoke Karma. Someone will post on a neighbourhood Facebook group that their bicycle was stolen from their front yard, and the police don't seem all that bothered about tracking down the perpetrators. And there it will be in the replies: "Don't worry. Karma will get them eventually".   They're not referring to the complex concepts of Karma in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosphy. The watered down, White version of karma casually invoked on the internet whenever someone has a grumble is taken to simply mean: if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you. Placing it, I guess, on the lower end of the scale of cultural appropriation of spiritual practices , the whitewashed, for-profit magic bowls and yoga and saging that function, in the words of the late Elizabeth Wurtzel, as "a brain-dead insult to the very Native American [or Asian] culture it is supposed to revere".  I can see why t