Samoa! Sigh! (7/12/2019)

I mentioned last week that I'm suffering a bit of battle fatigue over the measles epidemic in Samoa (the death toll today has reached 65) but there was at least some good news out of that troubled country this week. The government finally acted against the most egregious anti-vaccination liar still working in the country and locked him up.

Expressions of sympathy for Edwin Tamasese have been flowing in from anti-vaccination liars everywhere and someone has set up a GoFundMe appeal to pay any legal costs. As GFM does not allow appeals for legal costs the person who started the appeal must have lied to them about the objective, but lies would of course be expected. GFM have been advised of the true purpose of the fundraiser.

Some more good news (7/12/2019)

High-profile celebrities can often help a good cause, just as high-profile celebrities can do a lot of damage. The difference between the two groups could not be made clearer than by the news this week that the nurse who recently won the Miss Pacific Islands beauty contest, Fonoifafo Nancy McFarland-Seumanu, has put her official pageant winner's duties on hold for a while and will be spending her time administering vaccines across the country. Meanwhile total waste of oxygen Taylor Winterstein is spewing out more lies about vaccines and measles every day.

A friend of mine made a meme about this.

See more from Joe Heller here

She won't stop, will she? (7/12/2019)

I won't apologise for harping on about this harpy because she epitomises why this site exists. She lies without remorse and her activities present a danger to the public. This is Meryl Dorey, occasional President of the Australian Vaccination-[something or other] Network, someone who blocks anyone on Twitter or Facebook who might disagree with her, removes any critics from mailing lists she manages, spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get a court to censor me and most recently refused me entry to an event to which the media were offered a general invitation.

They just can't help themselves (7/12/2019)

The grand tour of the country getting people to pay to be lied to about vaccines has started. Vaxxed 2 is appearing in secret theatres and halls all around the place, with venue operators being lied to about what is going to be exhibited, locations only being announced immediately beforehand and the media being invited and then excluded if the organisers don't like the journalists. A friend of mine managed to get into one showing and we will hear all about it as soon as she gets out of therapy.

Another friend lives in the area of Australia with the lowest levels of childhood vaccination in the country so she had no trouble picking up one of  the promotion pamphlets.

Some people have been laughing at the misspelling of the word "Australian" but I have pointed out that a deliberate error is often introduced into anti-vaccination literature just to make sure that it contains at least some falsehood. Total truth is anathema to the vultures.

I come from a land down under (7/12/2019)

It looks like Cyanide and Happiness but I suspect it's not.

The book is almost here! (30/11/2019)

Volume 2 of my collected scribblings covering material published here and elsewhere between July 2003 and December 2004 has made it through the assembly and proofreading stages and is now in the process of meandering through Amazon's maze of twisty little passages before becoming available for sale. It's a Kindle ebook right now, but might make it to a paperback real book after I get over the stress of putting it all together.

In one of those marvels of progress in technology, the books I published in 2014 went straight from Microsoft Word to Kindle with all pictures exactly where I wanted them to be. The 2019 version of Amazon's Kindle creator ignores all positioning and word wrapping and makes everything look like a dog's breakfast. I've spent most of the last week removing all non-essential pictures and figuring out how to get the remaining ones to appear in approximately meaningful locations. (Some were displaced by a couple of paragraphs by the translation process!). Luckily I spent many years doing maintenance and debugging of badly documented computer programs and a few years at university studying the internal workings of the brains of rats and first-year students so I am well equipped to solve problems by inferring from limited or inadequate data. The next book will take a lot less time now I know how things work.

You can get your very own copy here.

Found anonymously on Facebook, so I don't know who I stole it from.

Just when you think we have reached Peak Stupid ... (30/11/2019)

A little while ago the sane world was taken aback when it was announced that the state of Ohio had legislated that school children could not be penalised for providing wrong answers in assignments if the answers were based on firmly held religious principles. This was obviously an attempt to get the mind rot of creationism back into schools, with the inevitable result of producing scientifically illiterate adults. (A few years ago Toyota moved a manufacturing plant out of a state that had allowed creationism to be taught in schools as if it had some relation to reality. The company said they could not afford the risk of employing badly educated workers.)

Things have now got worse, because while creationism just restricts learning, a new law will result in women dying. The new law says that doctors must reimplant ectopic pregnancies or face prosecution for facilitating abortion. Ectopic pregnancy is when the embryo starts to grow somewhere other than in the uterus (most commonly in one of the fallopian tubes). There is no way that the foetus can develop to full term and such pregnancies threaten the life of any woman unfortunate enough to have it happen to them. The only treatment is surgery to remove the embryo. It is simply not possible to then reimplant it into the uterus. Not just difficult, not just unlikely to result in a full term baby - not possible at all with any expectation of anything other than further complications, the possible death of the mother and the need for more surgery. Only someone totally unfamiliar with how the human body works could even suggest it. Or someone so blinded by religious bigotry that they think that dead women are a small price to pay when you believe that God demands that every conception results in a birth.

Free-range lunatics outside the asylum.

You can read the story here. Where the article says "Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science" it is speaking the truth. This could go down in history like the attempt to legislate squaring the circle which would have resulted in π having to be exactly equal to 3.2 (Bill #246 which came before the Indiana General Assembly in 1846). That attempt failed after much mocking and ridicule, but there seems to be more madness in the world these days.

Speaking of people who want others to die ... (30/11/2019)

The horror of the measles epidemic in Samoa continues.

The number of dead children will have increased by the time you read this. So let's look at what anti-vaccination liars have been saying about this tragedy.

This comment comes from "Australia's leading vaccine researcher", Meryl Dorey of the constantly-renamed Australian Vaccination-xxx Network. (Yes, the "xxx" is deliberate - anti-vaccination liars are as offensive as porn. More so, actually.) It is typical of the nonsense coming from these creatures.

The two children who "died within minutes of receiving their MMR vaccine" did not die from any effect of any vaccine. They were administered a totally different medication by mistake and the people responsible have faced criminal charges over the deaths. Ms Dorey knows this but her hatred of vaccines prevents her from acknowledging the facts. And to any thinking person the increase in infections from a highly infectious disease following suspension of vaccination against that disease would come as no surprise. Ms Dorey has described measles as "benign" and says that the name comes from the Sanskrit for "gift from the Goddess", so why is she now admitting that "children are dying from measles"? Surely "Australia's leading vaccine researcher" couldn't be exhibiting ignorance. Or hypocrisy.

I could show you more of the lies and nonsense from clowns like Taylor Winterstein (who still denies any responsibility for her actions in the country earlier this year) or the people who are sending Vitamin A to Samoa or the liars who reported a GoFundMe fundraising campaign to provide medicines to Samoa as being fraud (the appeal was stopped for a short period, but GFM finally saw the lie for what it was and reinstated the account) or any of the other actions of the turds posing as humans who have slithered onto the bandwagon but I'm going to keep them around in case I need to induce vomiting. The drought has killed my ipecac plants and my local apothecary is running low on supplies for the same reason, so I'm pleased to have an alternative. Alternative medicine, you might say.

Or, put another way - I'm suffering from mental and emotional exhaustion from the constant stream of dreadful news from Samoa. One good thing is that the Samoan Prime Minister has come out with an unambiguous statement supporting vaccination and has publicly censured the quacks and parasites who have been trying to profit from the outbreak. Mandatory vaccinations for school attendance and criminal charges against quacks look like happening.

In a 1646 book called Pseudodoxia Epidemica Sir Thomas Browne had this to say about "Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers, and Charlatans":

For their Impostures are full of cruelty, and worse than any other; deluding not only unto pecuniary defraudations, but the irreparable deceit of death.

Describes anti-vaxxers and quacks as if it were written yesterday.

See more SMBC here

I can't go to the movies! Sob! Sob! (23/11/2019)

A couple of weeks ago I warned about an upcoming plague of screenings of a movie filled with lies. The organisers invited the media to come to the screening sessions, so how could I not ask for a ticket?

Hello Aneeta,

I'm a freelance journalist (MEAA member 2011631) and I would like to take up your offer to attend a screening of Vaxxed II. Because I live in the country (Oberon) the only one I can reasonably get to is December 5 in Newcastle.

Thank you in advance, and I'm looking forward to seeing the film.

(The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is the union covering journalists, actors, musicians and everyone else who serves to entertain or inform the public.)

I received a reply from Meryl Dorey, the woman who wasted a year of my life in an attempt to get a court to prevent me from speaking about her vile anti-vaccination activities:

Dear Peter,

Nice try. Members of the Australian Skeptics who have a history of openly abusing families of the vaccine injured as not welcome at these events.

So I thought I had better politely respond. I didn't bother to address the claim that "Members of the Australian Skeptics have a history of openly abusing families of the vaccine injured" because this lie has been refuted on more occasions that I've had pizza for dinner. Of course, as skeptics we await any evidence of vaccine injury but so far none has been forthcoming.

Thank you.

I will be attending two functions with other journalists that week (one of them the MEAA Christmas party) and I'm sure I'll get some good laughs when I tell people that someone who loudly proclaimed "Fight against censorship!" on her organisation's Facebook page has refused a journalist entry to an event to which the media were invited.

Have a good Christmas. The parents of the children dying of measles in Samoa won't be doing that.

And in case you think I'm being misleading about "Fight against censorship!", remember that this is the woman who has banned or blocked me from several mailing lists, from following her on Twitter or from commenting on the AVN's Facebook page. Dictionaries carry a picture of Meryl Dorey next to the entry for "hypocrisy".

And speaking of measles ... (23/11/2019)

No, I don't know who drew it, but I will acknowledge them if someone tells me who they are

It never stops, does it? (23/11/2019)

Did you know that the Google search engine now only contains links to sites that say that the trails behind aircraft are just condensation of the water produced by burning hydrocarbon fuel in the engines and have banned any links to sites revealing the truth about chemtrails? I didn't know this fact until I read the headline:

Google Has Scrubbed Their Search Engine Of All Opposing Views On Chemtrails, Showing Only Results That Promote Official Gov’t Narrative

It had to be in big, bold capital letters so that people wouldn't miss it, but on the web site where I saw it it was so big I had to step back from the screen to read it.

Of course, I have always been aware of the truth, and I have the sign and t-shirt to prove it, but this new censorship is concerning. Next thing you know, Google will be delisting 9/11 Troofer sites, cancer curers, Holocaust, vaccination and climate change skeptics and other groups who challenge the orthodoxy. And how will we find out the truth then?

And yes, I'm being sarcastic.

See more Jesus and Mo here

I'm so excited (and I'm not even a song from the disco era) (23/11/2019)

One of my New Year Resolutions for 2015 was to get on with producing the next volumes of "Things I Think About", an anthology of things I've written over the years. I got a bit sidetracked in 2015, what with moving out to the country and reinventing everything about my life, but I've finally got around to keeping that resolution, and Volume 2 will be released in the next week or two (depending on how long it takes for proofreading and remembering how to do the Kindle stuff at Amazon). Other resolutions from 2015 such as spending two hours every day practising the guitar, not eating KFC and training for the half-marathon will be resurrected in 2020, as they are every year.

Watch this space!!

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