The Millenium Project

It's back!

March 16, 2019

I write. Right. (16/3/2019)

It's not been all beer, skittles and vacation around here while the site has been taking a sabbatical. I still had to get into costume (or should that be "out of costume"?) to write my Naked Skeptic columns for Australasian Science magazine. The latest one is about how quacks and pseudoscientists love to adopt Nobel Prize winners who apparently support their delusions. In most cases this support is nonexistent, as would be expected.

You can read my words of wisdom here.

What can I say about Christchurch? (16/3/2019)

Many of my friends have decided to avoid social media for the day to avoid reading about the murder of 49 worshippers in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The reactions to the atrocity from some directions have been predictable - lunatics have been calling it a "false flag" operation designed to give the government an excuse to place restrictions on gun ownership (the murderer's "manifesto" says that he wants gun restrictions eased!) and a particularly vile Australian politician has said that this is the inevitable result of allowing Muslims to migrate to a country. These people can be ignored, as can anything the murderer had to say about why he did it.

One good thing that might come out of this is that the NZ Prime Minister has announced that tighter controls will be applied to gun ownership, as happened in Australia following the massacre of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996. Of course, this will just add to the "false flag" cries (which go on any time some lunatic kills a lot of people), but these cries make less sense than the squawking of seagulls because seagulls are more intelligent than gun fondlers.

A sentiment from Australia to New Zealand. It's all over Facebook, and I will acknowledge "Rebel"
as the creator if someone can tell me who they are.

It spreads like cancer (16/3/2019)

The evilness of the late and unlamented cancer quack Hulda Clark didn't die when she did (of cancer!). One of her disciples in Malaysia has branched out and is now in the anti-vaccination lying business. Of course it's really the same business - kill people by denying them proper medical treatment or kill children by denying them vaccinations. The only problem with the business model is that dead kids don't grow up to develop cancer so they never reach the right money producing age. But who has ever thought that anti-vaccination liars can think that far ahead?

Thank you to reader Bing Leow for bringing this to my attention.

Chiropractors quack on (16/3/2019)

Chiropractors have been in the news around my place recently. To nobody's surprise, chiros have been found to be cracking the backs of very young children. Well, it did surprise some people who have short memories because this idiocy had been given wide exposure in 2013. This picture of a chiropractor attempting the impossible even reappeared as if it was new news.

The other disturbing news about chiropractors was a practice called "coccyx manipulation" which involves the chiropractor poking a finger into a child's rectum to make adjustments to the base of the spine. There were immediate justifications for this sexual abuse made by chiropractors, of course, and calls from sane people to have the Chiropractic Board of Australia take action to ban the practice. Given the CBA's inaction in 2013 to the reports and outrage at children's spines being cracked (they talked big, but did nothing), even if professional displeasure is being shown nothing will be done to actually stop chiropractors doing something that would get other people sent to prison. (Please don't try to equate it with manual prostate examination - that is a medical procedure to investigate a medical condition, not something done for no real reason to treat something that doesn't exist.)

There is of course a replacement danger if the CBA takes real action against chiropractors behaving badly. It is the risk to aircraft of collision with flying pigs.

It's deja vu all over again (16/3/2019)

A team of expert vaccine researchers have taken three years to examine the thesis by Judy Wilyman that resulted in her being awarded a PhD by the University of Wollongong. Why it took them so long to discover the "bleeding obvious" is a mystery. One of the things I was taught at university about research was to always pay attention to the references and bibliography attached to any scientific work. The usual reason is to see how many times the authors cite themselves, but my experience with pseudoscientists, quacks and anti-vaccination liars is that they will often cite things that totally disagree with them in the expectation that nobody will check. In the case of Ms Wilyman's thesis it was only necessary to look at the very first entry in the bibliography to find a book that totally refuted everything she had to say. The book was Vaccination: The Facts, the Fears, the Future by Gordon Ada and David Isaacs. (Gordon Ada is Professor and Visiting Fellow at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra. David Isaacs is a practicing paediatrician, Staff Specialist in Infectious Diseases at the New Children's Hospital, Westmead, Sydney and Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney. I found my copy of the book in a bookshop on a shelf next to books by Hulda Clark and other quacks. I emailed Dr Isaacs to tell him that I had liberated it because it looked embarrassed.)

You can see what I had to say about the thesis shortly after it came out here, together with a response by Ms Wilyman's thesis supervisor.

The climate is changing. It really is. (16/3/2019)

I don't think it's a secret that I'm what climate change deniers call a "warmist". (Apparently climate change deniers don't like being called deniers because it might remind people of Holocaust deniers. Well, that is tough, and if they are offended I don't really care. If you continually deny the truth then you are a denier.) Evidence of the climate changing over the last few decades is everywhere around the country town I live in, from changing rain and snowfall patterns to systematic movements in animal breeding cycles to changes in plant flowering and crop ripening times.

NASA's world temperature map

Australian Skeptics Inc has released an updated version of their 2010 statement on climate change and you can read it here. It will probably come as no surprise that I agree with it.

In one of those coincidences that cause believers in the paranormal to say "See, I told you so", reader Damien Taylor has sent me a link to 50 things that we have to get to look at real soon before they disappear under the ocean or are destroyed by increasing temperatures or eroding winds and rain. You can see "50 Most Beautiful Places That Will Be Affected By Global Warming" here.

And a bit more nostalgia (16/3/2019)

In 2016, ex-Dr Wakefield produced a film of such incredible awfulness that it made anti-vaccination liars wet their pants with glee. Showings were held all over the place, with people paying good money to see what they could see on YouTube for free. In Australia, the usual lies were told to venues that would never consider showing anti-vaccination propaganda for a picosecond in order to get the vile film into school and council public halls, and the locations were kept secret until the last moment (supposedly to prevent sane people turning up and disrupting proceedings, actually to prevent the venue owners being told about the travesty until it was too late). Some of the perpetrators toured Australia with it, adding to the moans of pleasure coming from liars. (This had at least one good outcome - two famous anti-vaccination liars, Pauline Tommey and Suzanne Humphries, were told that they needn't bother to apply for visas to enter Australia for the next few years because they will not be let back in.)

If you have an hour and a half to waste you can watch the film at this not-so-secret venue.

I loved this entry in the comments about the film at the International Movie Data Base site:

and about another 100 more references.

March 14, 2019

It's back! (14/3/2019)

The first six words of the first song on what many consider to be the greatest rock or popular music album of all time are "It was twenty years ago today". Well, it was twenty years ago today that The Millenium Project started to play, so I thought it was a suitable time to bring it back from the extended sabbatical. (Note: For some reason I had thought that the birthday was March 13. A bit of research showed that the original launch date was March 14, 1999. I was pleased about this because March 13 is the birthday of L. Ron Hubbard, inventor of Scientology, and who would want to share a birthday with him?)

I hope the loons welcome me back, because without them there is no Millenium Project.

A lot happened while I was away and I will catch up with most of these things over the next few weeks.

A couple of notable changes have to do with how I can get some money to help with the running costs of the site (including legal fees, of course, because I expect that I'll be offending some thin-skinned people who need to be offended). As well as making me sort of lawyer proof it would be handy to have some spare cash to attend quackery and pseudoscience events and to subscribe to some publications and organisations that require money to get inside.

I'm no longer going to attempt to run advertisements. Google have twice cancelled my account, once for mentioning that I was showing ads on a page which had ads showing - apparently this is encouraging people to click on advertisements which for some reason is against Google's rules. The second time was because Google thought that my page about penis enlargement spam was actually a sales outlet for penis enlargement products. Changing that page to not show advertisements wasn't good enough, and I ended up giving up. The money that came in from the advertisements didn't cover the cost of the coffee I drink while working on the site anyway. (As with commission on Amazon book sales, the income gradually reduced to almost nothing over the years as the original high rates were eroded in the cause of greater profits.)

I've also had two methods over the years to collect donations. I originally used PayPal, but they decided I must be running a money laundry and insisted I incorporate as a non-profit organisation, with all the associated costs and bureaucracy. While I was running my IT consulting company I could collect donations through the company's secure site and credit card facilities. Now that I've retired I don't need to keep the credit card thing going.

I'm now using Patreon, which allows people to be patrons of the site by contributing a small amount each month (or even once only, because I'm sure you can opt out at any time). Look for the buttons all over the site. I'll say "Please" now, with an implied "Thank you" afterwards.

Another change is the method of notifying people that the site has been updated. The company who provided a service to notify visitors when the front page changed was taken over by someone who broke the system, so that's gone into the bin. Updates will be announced on Facebook and Twitter, so follow me there to get the latest news. (I might even add some other social media sites one day if I can get the young folk to tell me how they work. Apparently I have 122 followers on Instagram even though I've never posted anything there.)

Updates might be a bit irregular until I get my rhythm back, but again Saturdays will be the preferred option.

As part of the resurrection, I've been going over every page in the site (there are lots of them!) looking for style, grammar and spelling problems, and I've also been fixing all the links that have died or changed in the last three years. If you see anything I've missed, please let me know.

And I've already received my first hate mail. I'm back in business.

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