The Millenium Project

Welcome to a brand new year. We can only hope that this year is better than the last two and that one day we can stop wearing masks everywhere, stop needing COVID testing because we have been exposed to plague carriers (I've been tested about a dozen times, all thankfully negative) and maybe even stop listening to batshit crazy people offering "cures" (in 2020 it was bleach, in 2021 it was horse dewormer paste, in 2022 the old "drink your urine" thing is already back). I'm optimistic but I've been doing this for too long to hope that sanity finally wins over idiocy in the near future.

Things will be a little random around here this year. 2021 was a bit of a disaster for my other hobby, media coverage of car rallies, because almost everything was cancelled because of floods, other weather conditions (I got snowed on in November! In Australia!) and of course COVID restrictions about travel and about people getting together. 2022 looks to be a lot busier and you can see my planned activity here. Also, I've resurrected my motorsport competitor credentials so I might be inside some of the competing cars instead of standing out in the dust, rain and wind taking photos. There are those old sayings about being as busy as a one-armed paper hanger or a one-legged arse kicker. That's me for the next twelve months.

Stolen Borrowed from somewhere. I'll acknowledge the creator* if some one tells me who it is.
(* Not that Creator. I haven't gone mad.)

Marcus Blackmore, main owner of Australia's biggest purveyor of snake oil had a couple of parties over the Christmas period. Mr Blackmore denies being anti-vaccine (of course) but hasn't found the time in between counting his millions to get to a doctor and actually have the shots. As it could be expected that his social circle would include people of similar quackery sentiments (plus the usual brain-dead hangers on social butterflies who worship the rich list) the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was sort of predictable - "Party pooper COVID ruins rich-lister fun". You can click on the image to read the complete article.

It would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this site to hear that Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination-[more dead children] Network has been found to be being less than truthful. You could even say she was lying, although there is some doubt about this because there is a school of thought that says that to be a liar you have to know that what you are saying is not true. My opinion is that she not only knows that what she says is not true but she is what philosopher Gary Hardcastle called a "bullshitter" in that she doesn't care if it is true or not.

Her latest was to claim that 20% of children between 5 and 11 in one state have contemplated suicide, caused by the unnecessary disruption to family life caused by the COVID scare. She of course denies the severity (and even existence) of the disease and is totally opposed to any campaign of vaccination to defeat it.

Someone bothered to check the facts of her claim and to nobody's surprise it was found that she was citing the wrong statistics from the wrong age group. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the article telling this story or even quote it because of this warning:

All information, text and images included on the AAP Websites is for personal use only and may not be re-written, copied, re-sold or re-distributed, framed, linked, shared onto social media or otherwise used whether for compensation of any kind or not, unless you have the prior written permission of AAP.

One could wonder why they bother writing something if they don't want anyone to read it or talk about it, but I will respect their request for invisibility and totally avoid telling you where you can go to read it.

I went away for a few days over the New Year weekend and when I got home I found a turd in my letterbox. Not an actual turd, but a couple of pieces of paper doing a reasonably good impression. They came from an outfit called Reignite Democracy Australia warning about the dangers of vaccinating children. This outfit is virulently anti-vaccine and no lie is too untrue for them to use in their deranged campaign to oppose vaccinations. (The RDA web site has been closed by the hosting organisation.)

The owner of RDA is a woman named Monica Smit and she has been imprisoned for organising anti-vaccine and COVID denial demonstrations in Melbourne. Nothing coming from her or RDA can be believed. There was news over the weekend of someone who tried to burn himself to death to avoid vaccination. This was the second such attempt over just a few days and Smit had declared the first one to be a martyr acting heroically for the anti-vaccine cause and encouraged others to follow. One did.

Click on the picture to see what turned up, but wear a raincoat and put plastic sheeting down to avoid damage to your clothes and carpet from the vomiting. The good news is that both my town's Mayor and the local police are concerned about this sort of thing being circulated in the town, although I'm not sure what, if anything, they can do to stop it.

With the arrival of yet another COVID strain and an outbreak of infection and hospitalisations following the ill-advised relaxing of contact and mask rules just before Christmas (when people could be expected to travel and gather in groups) new restrictions have been announced by my state government. Prominent among these new restrictions are bans on groups gathering for singing and dancing. We are all being encouraged to buy and use Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) kits. Unfortunately, RATs are almost impossible to find and the laboratories doing the more usual PCR tests have been overwhelmed. I had to have a test because the contact tracing system put me in a place where there had been a positive COVID carrier - no RAT was available and it took almost a week to get the (negative) results of a PCR test (never more than 24 hours on previous occasions), during which time I had to isolate at home.

So, ICU beds full of unvaccinated people leaving no room for people who didn't get sick by choice, no quick home tests available (or at gouge prices if any can be found), fun, games and live entertainment closed down, huge delays in getting tested (the queue for drive-through testing near my place was blocking traffic two streets away) and more delays in getting the test results out, but the big news story of the week has been a tennis player who came to Australia to compete in the Australian Open but refused to comply with the rules regarding disclosure of vaccination status.

While all this was happening, our local "church" devoted to the worship of money, Hillsong, held youth camps. At these, everyone was given two RAT kits (I'm supposed to get ten free ones because I'm a pensioner with diabetes but there are none available) and it probably won't surprise you to hear that there was much singing and dancing happening.

So, a pretend church can defy all the rules that dictate the behaviour of the rest of us, rules intended to control an epidemic and protect the health of everyone else. You might wonder how this travesty was able to go unnoticed until after it was over. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the Prime Minister is a great supporter of Hillsong and has waved at the crowd from their stage, and the Minister responsible for managing the tennis player situation and keeping it on the font pages of the newspapers is a regular Hillsong attendee.

And have Hillsong been fined or suffered any other penalty for blatantly defying the rules being applied to the rest of us? Don't ask silly questions, just reread the last sentence in the previous paragraph.

I've written a lot of short articles and news items here over the last two decades. Each week a couple of these pieces will be randomly selected and displayed at the bottom of the week's update. They might not always still be relevant, but that's the way history works.

The SIDS and Vaccine Seminar (3/3/2012)
On March 1 I attended a talk about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and the horrors of vaccination, presented by Stephanie Messenger from Healthy Lifestyles ... Naturally, author of a bizarre children's book called Melanie's Marvellous Measles, a book designed for young children to teach them about the cheerful benefits of measles. Remarkably, nobody in the room, including Ms Messenger, thought that vaccines cause SIDS, but it was all downhill from there.

I might write a full report here next week. I had to order in a bulk pack of yellow highlighters from the stationery store and there was just too much material to work through in the time available if I wanted to do a good job. It is probably sufficient to say that I can't think of any standard anti-vaccination lie that was not presented, although I'll know more after I have gone through my copious notes from the event.

Another reason for waiting is I want to have a good read of Stephanie's newsletter, which appears to contain samples of all sorts of woo, from cancer cures to organic foods (with an article on this written by a homeopath who allowed his wife to die instead of getting her to a doctor) to the purity of water, plus the usual lies about vaccines.

The night wasn't completely wasted because I was able to get a free sample of one of the products Ms Messenger sells ( although I couldn't get a free sample of the $30 negative-ion toothbrush). It was a packet of ten negative-ion-charged feminine hygiene pads.

These things emit negative ions which can cure a range of medical and physical conditions. It almost goes without saying that they cure PMS, but it is the other things they work on that make them worth every cent of the price. They came with an A4 page covered on both sides with testimonials in very small type. The first one of these is from "Garry", who put them in his underpants to take away the pain and discomfort of diverticulitis. Not only that, but Garry had a PSA reading of 14.2 (doubled in a year!) and the pads took away the incontinence and "irritating pain" caused by his enlarged prostate. (Note – while PSA is not a terribly reliable indicator of prostate problems, most doctors start twitching if they see a reading above 4. Seeing 14.2 on the scale would have most competent doctors reaching for an oncologist referral form.) Stephanie provided her own anecdote of a man who had a severely swollen and discoloured leg as the result of a septic spider bite. A pad on the sole of his foot and another on the site of the bite had him back to normal in minutes. And they are cheaper than a trip to Lourdes. Stephanie suggested that the pads should be included in any well-equipped first aid kit.

Can you see why I needed more yellow markers?

See everything that appeared in 2012 here.

Strange mails indeed (31/1/2015)
I do Search Engine Optimisation for a living so it is no surprise that I receive a regular stream of spam offering to do SEO on my web sites. (When I was sued by a pyramid scheme operator in 2005 one of their formal complaints to the Court was that a search at Google for their company name had my page exposing them appearing above their corporate site. True story!) Strangely, I often get spams offering to improve the rankings of the web site belonging to ex-Dr Rebecca Carley, one of the few anti-vaccination liars to be actually and formally declared to be insane. I wondered why this would be and I have now found that not only does ex-Dr Carley mention me by name but she also exposes my email address to spammers. Ex-Dr Carley doesn't choose to reveal her own email address, so all I can do to return the favour is to suggest that spammers harvest webmaster@drcarley.com and start filling the inbox there with many offers of wonderful things. (It would be beyond irony if SEO spammers pick up that address from here and send messages to it offering to improve the ranking for The Millenium Project.)

The correspondence has moved beyond offering SEO services to ex-Dr Carley (and a look at her web site indicates that a good dose of web design wouldn't go astray), and now I have been offered products to sell.

My name is Sally, a sales from Huachuang Industrial Co Ltd., I got your email from website:http://drcarley.com/ Huachuang Industrial Co Ltd., is a component solutions provider and supplier of rubber and plastic for a wide range of industries. From aerospace, automotive applications, and electronics to HVAC and medical manufacturing.

There's more, but I don't want to expose people to too much amusement (and I'm laughing at ex-Dr Carley, not the rather attractive Sally (she included a picture of herself) who sent the misdirected email.)

See everything that appeared in 2015 here.

That's a picture of a back. It's not my back, but I'm back from all the distractions of the last few weeks. There was a car rally that almost didn't happen because of flooded roads and a local council election that turned from working only on election day to two weeks of rather intensive days collecting votes before polling day. (Unlike some other countries, we make it very easy for people to vote in elections. More than half the eligible voters took advantage of the early voting centre, and as we had to do a preliminary count of the votes taken on the day at the end of polling day, the more early voters there were the sooner we all got home.)

I've somehow managed to not avoid helping a family member move house so I'll be busy for the next week or so, and then there's Christmas and New Year so I'll be disappearing from here until the middle of January. I'm also booked in for my COVID vaccine booster in the next week. Life just keeps getting in the way of life, doesn't it?

The picture of a spine reminds me that everyone should pencil in a New Year's Resolution to stay away from chiropractors. I make this resolution every year and it's one that I find very easy to keep.

It must be time for anencephelics to start raving about the "war on Christmas", when non-believers are supposed to start telling everyone to say "Happy Holidays" instead of Merry Christmas. As the word "holiday" is an evolution of the words "holy day" it would be rather silly to replace the name of one holy day with a generic term, but the fundamentalist extremes of religion and atheism are both so out of touch with reality that they can and should be ignored.

This particular atheistic secularist is quite happy to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Around my place it's a secular occasion when we get together with friends and relatives, have a couple of days off from work and celebrate the good things in our lives. And I happen to like some of the music at community carol singing events (although "Jingle Bells" sets my teeth on edge and I can't find any mention in the Bible of any little drummer boy doing paradiddles for the infant Jesus).

So, as I say every year – Merry Christmas, drink responsibly, drive safely and try not to do both on the same day.

Some Christmas cartoons from the excellent Taboo book of cartoons that were rejected for publication. As the book came out in 1966 I'm not trying to find the artists' web sites.

People have died in various parts of the world attempting to vote, so I have very little, let's say no, sympathy for anyone who refuses to vote because of "principles". People will tell you that voting is compulsory in Australia but that is not actually the case. What is compulsory is to be enrolled as a voter if you are over 18 years of age and that you turn up at a polling place and be marked as attending. (The US idea of registering to vote with a certain political party is a mystery to the rest of the world. Here you enrol with the Australian Electoral Commission and they don't care which party, if any, you favour and there is no way they can ask.)

Working at the council elections exposed me to some people who didn't take voting seriously. Here are their stories.

Not election related, but a Sovereign Citizen was prosecuted for not enforcing mask and sign-in rules at his hotel. At the court appearance he denied that his name was his name. (SovCits claim that the name on their birth certificate is not their real name – something to do with CAPITAL LETTERS and the government using the names on the certificates as asset backing for borrowing. Have I mentioned that these people are insane? My name is hand-written on my copy of my original birth certificate so maybe I was lucky to be born before the invention of the typewriter. Or something.) The magistrate then tried and fined him in absentia. The clown argued that he wasn't absent but the magistrate replied "You said you were" and moved on to the next thing on the agenda. I like this magistrate.

Back in 2014 a thing called Mayer Eisenstein died, making the world a better place. It claimed to be a doctor and was famous for coming up with the idea that autism could be treated (at huge expense) by a drug used for the chemical castration of rapists. The drug, Lupron, had a legitimate use in the treatment of precocious puberty so doctors prescribing it for autism were committing insurance fraud as well as medical fraud.

Unfortunately Eisenstein's ideas didn't die with it. I commented at the time that its family, who had knowingly and willingly profited from its lies, would probably continue its work. Well, finally, it looks like good news has arrived and this month's link check here showed that its web site has disappeared completely. Nobody can accidentally come across the bad advice any more.

It's usually considered bad manner to celebrate the deaths and misfortunes of others, but a reasonable case can be made when COVID deniers and anti-vaccination liars die or get sick from the disease they say doesn't exist and for which no preventative action should be taken. I am of course horrified that someone should have created a web site specifically targeted at these unfortunate people whose resistance to COVID has proved futile.

I am not so horrified, however, that I won't tell you to go to sorryantivaxxer.com and participate in the Schadenfreude of seeing what has happened to people who spread lies about a very serious medical problem that has resulted in an enormous amount of death and suffering. I just wish that I'd thought of it first.

November and December finish the sequence of months with names ending in "ber", but they also have the distinction of having names that say which month of the year they are. November is the ninth month and December is the tenth. Remember that, it's important.

Christmas gift suggestions
If last-minute present buying was not a good idea, the shops would not be open on Christmas eve. There is still time to get that gift for the friend you forgot or to get a little something extra for the most important person in your life. Deliveries can be slow at this time of year. Shop now.

Human Bone Jewellery	What says "I love you" better than a vertebra with an inset precious stone? Or a pair of earrings made from coccyx tips? Be careful when you order, though. A friend of mine ordered an ilium brooch and she didn't know how big a pelvis was until it arrived.
Leeches	Christmas comes at the start of summer where I live, and the place is full of nasty biting and stinging things and the sunburn gives us all skin cancer. A first-aid kit is always a useful present so, as well as the French perfume, why not give your wife a bucket of leeches?
The Fish Bonker	No, not what you thought! (Don't be so rude.) This is something that every fisherperson needs. Give one to the fish hunter in your life You never know when he might need to bonk a fish.
Human Skulls	The perfect ornament and conversation piece. Place them on the dining table with candles on top for that romantic occasion. Turn them upside-down to make unusual bowls to serve dessert to your guests. Put some on stakes in your garden to deter kids from taking a shortcut across your lawn. Thousands more uses. [The Internet Archive was so surprised by this that it forgot to save a copy]
The Original Alaska POOP MOOSE Candy Dispenser!	You've just finished a fine main course, the sweeter wines are being brought out to have with dessert, you think you hear your hostess say "I'll just bring out the mousse", and you look forward to a bowl of smooth chocolate confection with perhaps a dab of cream on top. Then you realise she said "moose".

Born To Sun: Word creations inspiring spiritual divine mastery
This is amazing. Have you ever noticed that some words contain letters and letter combinations that are used in other words? Once you see this, it is obvious that these words must be related, and it also opens up the possibility of creating new words from the building blocks exposed by this observation. As an example, I took the phrase "star struck". The first word is obviously made up of the letter "s", which is the same letter "s" as in the words "snake" and "serpent" (as well as the word "sibilant" that describes the noise they make, and it is the last letter of "reptiles") and the word "tar" which refers to the Unix backup utility program. The word "star" is therefore code for a compressed collection of snakes, or, in the vernacular, a "can of worms". It would be tempting to analyse "struck" in the same way and get a vehicle for transporting snakes, but it's more complex than that. In fact, you divide the word in half to get "str" and "uck". The first set of letters is the same as the start of the word "strumpet", which not only is obviously related to "crumpet" (the Englishman's word for a female) but contains the word "trumpet" which is part of the horn section. Need I say more? The second part of the word just leads to words ending in "uck", but I can't think of any word like that which could have anything to do with strumpets.

Irish UFOlogy
The signs were always there. Women dancing without moving their arms. Foaming black beverages where the bubbles go down as well as up. An obsessive desire to migrate and become police officers. Talk of "little people" and "the gift". Snakeless. Well, now we have an explanation - Ireland is a hotbed of UFO activity and alien visitation. You would dance funny, too, if you had just been probed and implanted, and what better way to achieve power than to infiltrate the police forces of major cities? The litttle people are grey coloured and the gift is telepathy. Every alien I have ever met has been partial to a meal of reptile (except the ones who landed in Iceland, who preferred auks) and the collapse of the Irish snake herds was due to over-hunting. (This was surprising, as most aliens come to warn us of environmental problems.) The bubble thing is the easy one - gravity was different where Guinness was invented.

And look at this piece of nostalgia, complete with blurring from being resized:

Mid-Atlantic Geomancy
I'm annoyed. When my house was built, the architect thought he could do it all himself and he didn't get a professional geomancer in to work on the labyrinth design. This has left us with a dwelling which lacks a bit of sacredness, although it is a very impressive labyrinth down there and the neighbourhood kids just love spending weeks lost in it. The real problem is bureaucratic, however, because we don't have the right certification. We have the plans for all the other services. There's the plan of the water and sewerage services and we had a dowser in to give us a good ley line diagram. I didn't know there was anything missing until we tried to sell the house and there it was on the agent's check list, right between "gas reticulation diagram" and "pest inspection certificate" - "labyrinth layout diagram". We have to get a licensed geomancer in and it's terribly expensive to do it after the house is built because of the maze of twisty little passages.

American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena
Every Christmas brings us new gadgets and ways of doing things. Now we store our music on CDs and MP3 players and such like, and the older technologies get forgotten. We keep the devices around the house for a while, but eventually they end up in the garage or attic, too good to throw away but too useless to sell. It is very encouraging, therefore, to find a use for that old reel-to-reel tape recorder that you paid so much for all those years ago. In addition, you can use the amplifier that you used to need before you got the new CD player and the microphones the kids had before they figured out that they were never going to be rock stars. Put them all together and you too can capture the paranormal sounds that permeate the aether. I went one step further and plugged in my old faithful Fender Stratocaster. I just left it all alone for a while, and when I played the tape back I could just faintly hear the beginning of a tune. As I strove to identify it, my daughter started to sing softly: "There's a lady who's sure, all that glitters is gold, ...".

The New Being Project
The creationists don't have it all their own way with scientific research, because here is a site showing how humans are evolving even as we type. The really exciting thing is that we seem to be about to make an evolutionary jump that will make the day that that monkey came out of the tree and invented calculus and swimming pool filters look like a picnic in the park. I can almost feel the non-linear intelligence around me. Come to think of it, IQ follows a normal or Gaussian distribution, which is definitely non-linear. But I digress ... I am also fascinated by the concept of "mind pretzeling". When I was studying psychology we did a lot of work with donuts, éclairs and the occasional sticky bun but nobody ever suggested the influence of salty snacks. I guess that's why I never became an edgeling.

I loved the background colour so much I had to keep it.

The Big Water Theory
I like a good scientific theory. For too long now, scientific creation scientists, the practitioners of Scientific Creation Science, have been handicapped by the lack of a cohesive and coherent theoretical framework to explain how the world is only 6000 years old. Oh, I know that there have been some attempts to force the Bible into the role of scientific textbook, but what was always needed was a Newton, a Galileo, a Harvey, a CrickAndWatson, an Einstein, a Pasteur, a Jenner, a Rutherford, a Bohr to make that next intellectual jump that opens up the truth to us all. Now we have one and, in fact, many of the people just mentioned are shown to have been mistaken in their ideas about how things work.

Another Tripod classic - bold red text on a black background. Perfect!

With car rallies back again after the COVID panic and me working full time on the December local council elections there's not much time left for hobby web sites, so there won't be much here during this month. Then there's December which turns into Christmas, so who knows when I'll get back to regular updates. But I will. Eventually/

During 2020, celebrity "chef" Paleo Pete Evans made news everywhere – he won the extremely prestigious Anus Maximus Award right here at The Millenium Project, he won the almost as prestigious Bent Spoon award from Australian Skeptics (for the second time!), he had some very well paying TV appearances cancelled, he was ordered to stop selling a health "food", …

Now we see that he had to sell his "health studio". Could it be that even in a hotspot of woowoo like Byron Bay he couldn't generate enough business curing things to make a living? There's hope for the world yet.

If you had artist Bruno Camara's imagination, you could come up with this resident of a sewer.

You don't really need imagination, however, because you just need to look at almost any anti-vaccination liar. Here are a couple of examples from Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination-[lie, lie, lie] Network.

From the short-lived and now dead social network Parler. Note the use of Donald Trump's face as an avatar. (At a recent anti-mask protest in Melbourne people were displaying "Trump 2020" flags as if this had anything to do with restrictions to control the COVID pandemic. In Melbourne. In Australia. In 2021.)

And possibly the most offensive and disgusting thing to come out of the anti-vaccination liar cesspit is an attempt to equate measures to control an epidemic with a campaign of genocide.

I've been following the activities of these awful people for many years but even now I can be surprised at the depths of their depravity. They ignore the rules of civilised society and they don't care who they might offend in their relentless campaign to increase the number of deaths from preventable diseases. Dorey once tried to get a court to order me to stop saying things about her that she didn't like, but nothing I ever said about her exposed her venality better than her own actions in equating vaccination to rape and the Holocaust.

A well managed sewer would reject the body of an anti-vaccination liar because it would overload the sewage treatment works like a sudden influx of a million tonnes of shit.