It's Awards Time (18/1/2020)

The lawyers at Farr, Gough & Dye and the accountants at Hyde, Tacks and Cash have supervised the counting. The envelopes are in the hands of the models from the Bimbeaux agency. The red carpet is now empty and the guests are in their seats. The last white lines have been wiped from benchtops in the restrooms. All is in readiness.

I am handed the first envelope. Instead of opening it I tell a humourless joke. It's opened and there is a long and unnecessary pause accompanied by a drum roll that only ends when the drummer's arms get tired. Ladies and gentlemen, let the announcing of the Millenium Awards for 2019 commence.

And the 2019 Winners are:

It's begging season (18/1/2020)

If it's good enough for anti-vaxxers to sell stuff and beg for donations it's good enough for me. My emotional support cockatoos don't go to the shop to buy their own birdseed, the respirators that the staff use need new filters to replace the ones clogged with bush fire smoke, the electricity to run this computer doesn't grow on trees (those few trees that are left) and spare parts for the Range Rover I'm going to buy one day are going to be more expensive after Brexit on January 31.

Here's what you can do to help.

You can buy some books from the extensive bookshop. It would help even more if you bought books that I've written.

If you are feeling particularly altruistic you could even make a one-off or regular donation through Patreon.

Thank you in advance.

Speaking of emotional support animals ... (18/1/2020)

See more Speedbump from Dave Coverly here

I have a form to fill in (18/1/2020)

How could any thinking person not object to this pack of dangerous clowns changing the name of their political party to hide their true objectives? After all, who could be opposed to informed medical options? I get informed about choices by my doctor all the time.

If you think that party names don't matter, a raving libertarian loon (tautologies, I know) managed to get elected to the Australian Senate by a combination of a name very similar to an established party and a fortuitous position on the ballot paper.

I've got my objecting pants out of the wardrobe and I'll be writing.

Chiropractor pitches for Nobel Prize (18/1/2020)

I've been a bit busy this week with the awards so I'll be giving this valuable piece of research some attention over the next few days. Apparently a "Famed Chiropractic Scholar" has proved that it is wrong to say that subluxations don't exist, and even applies the label "deniers" to those who have noticed that there is no evidence of these spine misalignments causing dis-ease. Not only proved them wrong wrong but totally "refutes and negates false assertions". As this article appears in the prestigious Chronicle of Chiropractic ("The source for news on conservative traditional chiropractic") it must be taken seriously

What? Wot? (18/1/2020)

Yes, this person was serious. They walk among us and they vote.

Measles in Samoa (18/1/2020)

Now that the last survivors of the epidemic are out of hospital, the government of Samoa can get on with stopping it happening again. You will notice that some people have been forging vaccination records. I wonder where they got that idea. Actually I don't wonder at all, because I see suggestions every week about how to lie about vaccination status, and one of those suggestions is to forge documents. It's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, so why shouldn't it be happening in Samoa? And people wonder why I treat anti-vaccination liars with contempt and call them liars.

Let's be balanced ... (18/1/2020)

See more from Mark Parisi here

I'm back after Christmas (11/1/2020)

See more from Tim Whyatt here

2019 Awards, but not yet (11/1/2020)

I was planning on announcing the 2019 Millenium Awards today, but some late activity right up to December 31 by anti-vaccination liars, climate change deniers and other forms of human sewage has meant that the judges have decided to put off their final decisions for a week or two and return to their volunteer roles fighting bush fires. The front runner for the Anus Maximus Award is still out in front and probably won't be challenged, but I like things to be correct and fair. If The Three Stooges had released a film on the day that Oscar nominations closed in 1939 it wouldn't have been fair to exclude it from contention just because someone else had made "Gone With The Wind".

Happy New Year (11/1/2020)

Stolen from some anonymous Facebook user

Everything is still on fire (11/1/2020)

I'm still mightily distracted from doing stuff like this web site by the bush fires consuming a large proportion of the state I live in (which is twice the size of Germany for people unfamiliar with Australian geography). Here's a useful comparison (it's a few days old, so more might have been burnt since then).

I used to compete in and organise forest rallies back in the day and one of my pastimes now is doing media work at rallies across NSW. One consequence of this is that apart from Canobolas State Forest near Orange, every forest I've driven in or been to in the state has either burned or been threatened by the current fires and and conversely I've been to every forest that's on fire. (Canobolas State Forest is sort of an island of pine trees in the middle of grassland. There was a small grass fire in bordering farmland but it was quickly extinguished.) This means that I can identify with every horror story in the media by saying "I've been there".

Where I live isn't directly threatened by fires, but our major industries are. It looks like we haven't lost any of the pine plantations that support the town's large timber processing industry, but the border roads on at least two big forests have been the containment lines to drive back fires in neighboring native forest. The tourist industry is at a standstill in what would normally be one of the busiest periods in the year. Jenolan Caves is closed to the public (and came very close to having all infrastructure destroyed), the motels and hotels are virtually empty and one big festival held every January has been cancelled. We have probably lost the biggest national park in the region, and the next big tourist attraction (mushroom gathering season) might not have any unburnt places for gatherers to find mushrooms.

But we are lucky. Nobody here has lost a house or a life or a farm. I have friends living in places where even if they haven't had to evacuate from their homes they have been packed and ready to do so. I have friends who have been away from their paying jobs fighting fires as volunteers. Whole towns have been totally wiped out, with little hope of ever recovering.

The damage has not only been to trees and other property - the number of wildlife deaths has been estimated to exceed a billion animals. Some species might have been driven to extinction, and others will have had their habitat destroyed. The picture shows two galah parrots who came to visit my birdbath. One of them was the normal pink and grey, the other was black all over with a tail that looked a bit short. If he made it the 18 kilometres from the nearest fire I'm sure that many others didn't. And to give you an idea of how much smoke we could get in town from that fire 18 kilometres away, the light pole and tree behind the birds were 50 metres away.

Speaking of my birdbath ... (11/1/2020)

I bought my birdbath from Bunnings, Australia's largest chain of stores selling hardware, tools, renovation necessities, building supplies and gardening stuff. I don't just give the birds water, I also scatter birdseed around on the ground near the birdbath. (I thought about scattering hot chips to attract seagulls but I'm a bit far from the coast.) As I bought the birdbath there and they are usually pretty cheap to buy from, I did a search for "bird seed" to see if I could get a bargain. This was the only product returned by the search of their entire site. At a hardware and DIY store! A mystery, wrapped up in rice paper.

Bring on the conspiracies (11/1/2020)

Any disaster whether natural or man-made brings out the conspiracy loons, and the current fires in Australia are no exception. Here are some examples.

• It's all the fault of The Greens because they oppose hazard reduction burning (The Greens political party has never held power in any Australian parliament and has a clear written policy supporting controlled burning to minimise bush fire potential).
• All the fires were lit by arsonists, so stop talking about climate change because it had nothing to do with anything (there were a very few instances of arson, with the vast majority of fires started by lightning striking bushland desiccated by drought)
• The fires were deliberately lit by warmist greenies to advance their agenda of pretending that the climate is changing
• My personal favourite - the fires were lit to clear the land for construction of a very fast train line between Sydney and Melbourne
• There was a big fire in 1891 so nothing has changed.
• If all electricity distribution wires (including the traction wires for electric trains) were buried underground there wouldn't be any sparks to start fires
• Another favourite - the fires were caused by exploding smart electricity meters. This was not accidental, but a deliberate government plot.
• It's God's punishment for something or other
• The ability of governments to control the weather has collapsed following the closure of the HAARP installation in Alaska
• Scariest of all - it's a sign of the End Times as predicted in Revelation, so there's nothing we mere humans can do about it.

And of course it's all caused and made worse by chemtrails. Especially chemtrails with aluminium in them.

Caution: Batshit crazy ahead.

You know that advice to never read the comments? I ignored it.

I'm no theologian, but I'm rather sure that Baal and Satan are not the same entity. And I absolutely love the way Apostrophe Man did the edit of Soros. I wonder why the writer didn't type "thi's".

Disclaimer: I once managed the programmers working on the computer systems of one of the world's largest aluminium producers. I can still remember the eerie feeling of the electricity in the air when I walked through the pot room at the smelter. It was as if there was a presence in the air. Maybe it was Baal. At the Christmas party we all used to sing the company song - "You can call me Al" by Paul Simon. (Sorry!!) Now I live in the country where the fields are full of BaaLambs. (Even more sorry!!)

You are expecting a joke but this isn't it (11/1/2020)

One of the things that the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke agree on is that Jesus said "Suffer the little children", but he didn't mean "Make them suffer". The publishers of these children's books obviously misunderstood and want children to suffer from ignorance, pseudoscience and nonsense. Jesus would be appalled and would probably knock over the tables in the bookshop. I know I'd feel like doing that.

What makes this even sadder is that the books come from Macmillan, once a reputable publisher.

Oh, all right (11/1/2020)

See more from Dave Coverly here

See more from Andrew Walz here

Have yourself a very merry Christmas (21/12/2019)

Sorry to go all Michael Bublé on you there, but it's that time of the year. According to the television and department store windows, it's when snow falls and we roast chestnuts over an open fire. Except that I'm writing this on the officially hottest day ever recorded in Australia, the only white stuff falling from the sky is ash from burning bushland and all open fires in the state are totally banned.

I live in the south east corner of Area 10. The picture below shows the areas burning near me (I live in Oberon near the red rectangle). If you want to know how big the fires are, the top one (Gospers Mountain) covers 450,000 hectares (three times the size of the recent fire in the Amazon forests that was threatening the survival of humanity according to some reports) and the bottom one (Green Wattle Creek) is 182,000 hectares. These are not trivial campfires. There are countries smaller than these fires.

Here's the rest of the state.

And what do those coloured signs mean? Red is "Emergency", yellow is "Watch and Act", blue is "Advice". The white markers are for traffic accidents and other things that require emergency service presence but apart from that don't really need to be worried about.

You can probably see why I'm a bit distracted today and my mind is on other things.

Have I mentioned that both state and federal governments have parties in power who deny climate change? There is a certain irony in the fact that fires made worse, bigger and more frequent by burning coal are threatening a coal-fired power station (that supplies 10% of the state's electricity) and its associated coal mine.

But let's get back to that Christmas thing (21/12/2019)

I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Fundamentalist atheists who object to this atheist using the word "Christmas" should address their concerns to devnul@ratbags.com where they will be comprehensively ignored. There's nothing religious about my Christmas - it's a secular time for friends and family. (I did give a food donation to one of the local churches because they distribute food parcels to families who are less well off than I am. When I dropped it off I mentioned that my family lives a long way away and the church lady said that members of her congregation are happy to invite lonely people (even atheists!) to lunch in their homes on Christmas Day. Christians behaving like Christians? What next?)

I hope that Santa brings you everything you want, and if you are dyslexic and get presents from Satan I hope you enjoy those too. I'll be taking a short break (three weeks this time, not three years) and The Millenium Project will be back on January 11. I might even have some awards to present. As I've said in prior years drink sensibly, drive safely and do them on different days. I'd like you all to come back next year when I hope to do even more offending of the offensive.

Say what? (21/12/2019)

Stolen Nth hand from Facebook.

And finally, last thoughts for Christmas (and for 2019) (21/12/2019)

Two more cartoons from the excellent Taboo book. As the book came out in 1966 I'm not trying to find the artists' web sites.

You can click here to see everything that has appeared on the front page over the last 20 years.