The Millenium Project

When I did this month's link check I found that yet again the web site belonging to George Hammond had disappeared. George is apparently the smartest man alive (and possibly the smartest who has ever lived) and I know this because he told me so. He also told me that "You're not only a snot nosed asinine and boring writer, you've got an ugly smelling contempt and ignorance for the higher levels of scientific ability". I thought of getting that printed on a t-shirt but I would have had to keep explaining the background.

George developed a Scientific Proof Of God (SPOG). It is not a hypothesis (SHOG) or even a theory (STOG). It is a proof!!! It's apparently based on the way the number four appears throughout the universe, from the four winds, the four points of the compass, the four legs on a horse, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four Beatles, the four walls of my bedroom and the four courses served at dinner with the Queen (soup, main, dessert, then port and cigars).

Stephen Hawking was seemingly too dumb to understand SPOG so I had no chance until, that is, I found this video of George explaining it.

Blackmore's is one of Australia's largest manufacturers of alternative "medicine" potions. They have had to announce a recall of one of their products because it was possibly contaminated with penicillin. Think about that - snake oil contaminated with real medicine. I suppose they could say that they had just followed Fleming's example and left a window open near the vat containing the batch.

On Thursday, May 14, the COVID-19 testers came to my town and set up shop. (Since you asked, I tested negative.) I posted something about it to the local community Facebook group, then this happened. As the person who clicked on the "Laugh" response is the group admin I assume that snarky emoji comments are acceptable in the group.

And yes, I suspended my usual rule about not blocking out names. I saw no need to embarrass the afflicted.

I've often said that I don't have the imagination to invent some conspiracy theories I see and I don't understand how people could be so frightened of the world around them that they can see everything as the work of evil forces trying to control mankind's thoughts and actions. We've long known that fluoridation of water was invented by the Nazis as a means of controlling the inmates of concentration camps and we found out last year that they are also responsible for the 440Hz frequency used to tune musical instruments. (The fact that if you multiply 440 by 136363636.363636 you get the 60GHz frequency of 5G is a matter for another day. But just look at those repeated 36s. Three sixes. 666.)

We now have further incontrovertible evidence that the Nazis have reached out even further into our shared consciousness and now control YouTube. And as everyone knows, YouTube videos are the highest form of evidence so whatever is there will be the final truth and what will be believed by millions.

You would expect a journal with the title Chiropractic & Manual Therapies to be reasonably sympathetic to the nonsense of chiropractic, but an article published on May 4, 2020 broke the mold. It had the title "A united statement of the global chiropractic research community against the pseudoscientific claim that chiropractic care boosts immunity" and was signed by 140 chiropractors and fellow travellers. It was a response to a claim by the International Chiropractors Association that spine twiddling could be a useful way to prevent infection, with special relevance to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (The ICA leapt to prominence in 2001 when its Pediatric Council awarded hero status to a man who beat a baby to death.)

There is this wonderful product called "Master Mineral Solution" (MMS) which can cure all sorts of medical conditions (including autism, apparently). It is rather expensive, as would be expected for the greatest and most useful medical treatment since the discovery of penicillin. To the rest of us it's chlorine bleach - the stuff we buy in 2.5 litre containers for a couple of dollars at the supermarket and use to keep our toilets sparkling or to remove mould from concrete paths (and is used by murderers in TV shows to remove bloodstains).

To people unfamiliar with the greed and lack of concern for customers shown by much of the alternative (to) medicine business it might seem almost unbelievable that a whole industry could be built around repackaging household cleaners and selling them for much more money. (I'm told that some MMS products are even more powerful because they are the chemicals used for chlorinating swimming pools, but the principle (if such a word can be applied here) still applies.)

It finally got too much for regulatory authorities and in April 2020 the US Department of Justice jumped on a pretend church that distributes the bleach and managed to get a court to order a ban on its sales. The trigger was when claims a cure for the COVID-19 pandemic appeared.

You can read the complete DOJ story here, but the quote below gives a taste of the lies being told by the promoters of this nonsense.

In a civil complaint and accompanying court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida today, the Department of Justice alleges that the defendants, Genesis II Church of Health and Healing (Genesis) and its principals, Mark Grenon, Joseph Grenon, Jordan Grenon, and Jonathan Grenon sell and distribute a product called Miracle Mineral Solution, also referred to as MMS. Genesis sells MMS through its websites claiming that it will cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent Coronavirus, which includes COVID-19, as well as other diseases including Alzheimer’s, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis, among others. MMS is a chemical product which, when combined with the included activator, creates a powerful bleach product that the defendants market for oral ingestion. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has previously issued public warnings to consumers that MMS can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration. The Justice Department sought preliminary relief from the court.

The thieves at the fake church hit back under the headline "The Contempt of the Department of Justice against the 1st Amendment and God continues! What will 'the people' do?". It takes a significant amount of both hubris and chutzpah to claim that a government department ordering a scamster to stop scamming shows contempt for the concept of free speech. I'm also sure God is both surprised and amused to hear that the DOJ has been attacking Him as well.

Not to be outdone, Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration went beyond just saying "Don't do that" and actually imposed a fine on the local distributors.

But leaving the best until last, here is what you see when you go to the web site of MMS Australia. As they say, "The crazy, it burns!".

Agreement for use of website By entering and using this site you expressly agree to the terms and conditions as stipulated herein, including but not limited to the registration of an account. This is a private website and any trade exchange is done by donation only, using functional Australian currency out of necessity. By using this website you agree that you will not make complaint, enquiry or give Notice to any alleged regulatory authority in relation to any information relating to this website, including but not limited to any names of items mentioned on this website or to any information relating any of the items on this website or to any information contained on this site whatsoever. If you hold a nexus to, including but not limited to being employed by, any alleged regulatory authority you must leave this website now, you are trespassing, you are trespassing, you are trespassing. If you hold a nexus to, including but not limited to being employed by or in contract in any capacity to, any alleged regulatory authority and you continue to trespass on this site that action will be taken as your agreement to being held liable before a Court for prosecution for trespass for an amount that will be determined at our sole discretion. If you do violate any of the express terms and conditions of using this website then you by your actions make admission to a knowing, voluntary and intentional breach of trust and to commissioning a tort. Further information is available for your perusal in our terms and conditions. Terms and Conditions Cookies may be used to speed up your interaction with the website, we have no interest in using them to collect data and/or information about you. Account registration is free.

Some of our old friends have popped to the top of the swamp this week. Here is someone commenting about them.

Top TV chef Pete Evans, he of the paleo diet and the $15,000 lava lamp, has finally lost his job as the host of a TV cooking show. (He didn't actually do the cooking but was paid

$800,000 a year to watch other people eat what other people had cooked.) Sadly he wasn't sacked for bringing the network into disrepute by his crazy and dangerous rants about health but because the show was tanking after being the top-rated show in the country for many years.

No doubt Pete will be back stronger than ever without having to worry about upsetting his employers (not that he ever seemed to worry about this in the past). The silver lining to his cloud could be that without his face going in front of millions of viewers three or four nights a week he might fade into insignificance as an ex-celebrity and people might stop caring about what he says or taking any notice of it. We can only hope.

In February I mentioned that some kook was asking the High Court of Australia to rule that vaccination is unconstitutional. One thing you have to give anti-vaccination liars credit for is their optimism and faith in the impossible. The kook, Solihil Millin, has resurfaced with a plan to disrupt Australia's major cities with protests the likes of which we haven't seen since the anti-war assemblies in the streets in the 1970s. Tens, or maybe even elevens of protestors are expected to gather outside parliamentary buildings to express their concerns about the restrictions on personal rights and freedoms dictated by governments in their attempts to control the (fictional) COVID-19 pandemic. Protestors will gain extra credit for carrying signs about 5G telephone masts and expressing their disappointment at the continued staying alive of Bill Gates. (Look at Bill Gates' initials and remember that the song "Stayin' Alive" was performed by the Bee Gees. Coincidence? There's no such thing.)

A couple of pieces of evidence from the weekend's protests about whatever people were protesting about. There were chants of "Arrest Bill Gates" which went on for hours. A journalist coined the term "moronavirus", making me incredibly jealous because I didn't think of it first.

Another of our old friends here, Fran Sheffield, has the answer to all our coronavirus questions. It is homeopathy, of course.

You will notice the advertisements for very expensive water and lactose pills. One of the first things taught in homeopathy school is to never let a chance to steal make money go by. You can read the full horror story here.

I wonder if Fran has paid the money she was ordered to pay when she lost a court case a few years ago. I suspect not, but I don't want to be too defamatory.

One of the biggest outlets for printed magazines has always been the display near the checkouts in supermarkets. It's where impulse buys happen because shoppers are forced to stand still and wait before it's their turn and picking up a magazine from the rack to pass the time is just too easy. (Magazine publishers hate self-serve checkouts for obvious reasons.)

Last year a new magazine appeared on the racks. To knowing people, the title What Doctors Don't Tell You was a bigger red flag than the one on top of the Chinese embassy in Canberra. It's the sort of thing you expect to hear from promoters of quackery and the rest of the anti-real-medicine crowd. Here is what the first cover looked like and all the signs were there from the start.

In an outbreak of good sense and concern for customers, Australia's two biggest supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, have announced that the magazine publishers can go elsewhere with the rag because it won't be in their shops.

If the cover of the first edition wasn't enough warning, here are two of the later ones.

Full-blown anti-medicine nonsense, with the only point in its favour being that the paper is glossier than that used for Nexus. How any reputable publisher ever got involved with this is a mystery.

It's been hard to miss the news stories about a mob of clowns suffering from encephalopathy and genital atrophy storming into the Michigan capitol building to demonstrate their annoyance at being asked to stay at home and not gather in crowds. They carried guns, naturally, because legislators always do what you ask when you run around like a lot of toy soldiers (without actually signing up as real soldiers, of course, because then you might get shot at).

People exploiting their 2nd Amendment rights to pretend to be soldiers while being too cowardly to actually enlist.

My suggestion to the legislators would have been to move a motion to have a minute's silence while pointing at the armed morons in the gallery, followed by a minute of laughter while still pointing at them. It was Thomas Jefferson who said "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions", but I would assume that most of these people wouldn't be able to spell his name (if they had even heard of him).

Put your mouse over the picture to see one of the finest uses of Photoshop I've seen for a long time.

In another place, a responsible gun owner demonstrated his lack of knowledge of physics and how the world works while simultaneously showing that he knows next to nothing about shooting with a high-powered rifle.

I hope this person never drops their mobile phone while driving in a car at 100km/h, because by their logic it would hurtle backwards and smash the back window. They should never jump up on a train either, because then they would crash into other passengers standing further back in the carriage.

How do these people manage to put their shoes on the right feet, let alone tie the laces?

And my comment about the shooter not knowing about guns? The poster asks "Where is the Coriolis Effect". Apart from the fact that the Coriolis Effect applies horizontally across the surface of the earth and has nothing to do with things happening vertically, shooting at anything beyond about a kilometre requires allowance for the effect, just as it does for wind speed. But what would I know about shooting with a high-powered assault rifle? I was only trained to use a weapon like that to kill people.

It is rather amusing and ironical to see people who claim that they are prepared for the coming confrontation with the government and can survive for months without contact with the world splashing around in pools of tears because they can't get a haircut or play golf. Just how prepared are these preppers? I reckon that if I had enough food and other supplies stashed away to keep me going for a year I wouldn't be complaining about the coronavirus lockdown. I'd welcome it and be treating it as practice and rehearsal when I could do some fine tuning.

This raised an interesting question. As a prepper who doesn't believe in a great conspiracy (or maybe even more than one conspiracy) is an oxymoron (as well as being a normal, everyday moron), who would the 832 group members be? Would they just be people who hate shopping so they only go out once a year? I live in a town where it snows occasionally and we can't get to the shops so everyone always has at least two weeks' supply of everything on hand, but I haven't seen anyone saying that this is necessary in case the government turns up the knobs on the HAARP system to force us to stay at home. (We had a lot of tourists coming into town a few weeks ago to buy all the toilet paper and spaghetti in the shops but traffic dropped off after we strung a couple of them up from lampposts.)

Anti-vaccination liars are obsessed with vaccine ingredients. I should point out that often these terrifying ingredients are present in minute quantities or occur naturally in the body anyway (as formaldehyde does). The standard practice is to list everything mentioned in package inserts and screech about how poisonous everything is. Added to the hysteria is the normal cry from quacks that you shouldn't put anything into your body that you can't pronounce, but nobody ever thought that quacks knew anything about chemistry.

Someone took the time to make this warning about ingredients. Just look at the terrifying names of the chemicals in these things

It's probably useless arguing with fools about things that have been known for centuries. But we have to keep doing it.

Following a tradition going back at least 98 days, here are some items from the May 2000 collection at the retired (like me) Quintessence of the Loon site. May 2000 was a tense time for IT consultants like me because we realised that we had less than two months left to gouge bill clients for modifications to their accounting systems for the impending arrival of the Goods and Services Tax (which the Prime Minister had promised to "never, ever" introduce). Preparations for the Sydney Olympic Games in September were only nine months behind schedule. Y2K was a dim memory and every garage sale seemed to have an abundance of now redundant toilet paper, baked beans and ammunition out there on the trestle tables.

Jumpin Jack Flash! It's a gas, gas, gas. Making Star Trek Real
Plato. Newton. Einstein. Sarfatti. The names resonate with the cosmos, each adding to the knowledge of the ones who have gone before. Newton said that he could see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he could not foresee the total reinvention and rediscovery of physical laws that Jack Sarfatti would reveal to us. For Jack to stand on a giant's shoulders would be redundant, because Jack is the giant himself. The giant of giants, to be precise. Don't let the title of this site fool you into thinking it is just another Trekkie mind meander. This is the real thing. Compared to Jack Sarfatti, Stephen Hawking might as well be a man in a wheelchair. In one of his essays, Jack says: "Inspired by Richard Wagner’s opera, Tanheuser, on the radio, having just seen Travolta and Sedgwick in Phenomenon, I realized that the post-quantum local decoding of nonlocal form-dependent intensity-independent future forces of destiny is the fundamental act of creative imaginings of a richer and more perfect reality." I rest my case.

Dr Sarfatti wrote to me:

Date sent: Sat, 06 Oct 2001 11:46:07 -0700
From: "Dr. Jack Sarfatti"
Subject: parody
To: loon@ratbags.com
Organization: The Sommerfeld Institute of Advanced Physics

Goofball, I am kidding around. Get a sense of humor.

I'm glad we cleared that up.
PB October 2001

(The original site has apparently been swallowed by a black hole and the link goes to a site in German which seems to be promoting Bitcoin (a black hole in itself). The late Professor Hawking would understand about black holes although Jack might not despite his impressive academic qualifications. Jack's current kook site can be seen here.)

Bee in Balance
Imagine this. Your dog gets skittled by a car and the back half of him ends up less than useless. He drags himself around the house, his incontinence making life unpleasant for everyone, until one day you decide that something has to be done. Unable to trust the vet, you look for a method to whack the dog in some natural-looking way (the kids would never believe that he died naturally from a bullet in the head). Gazing into the garden, you notice movement around the flowers and you think "Aha! Bees!". You figure that if he gets stung to death by a swarm of killer bees not only will your carpet cleaning problem go away in a manner which satisfies the family, but the tabloid newspapers will probably give you a new dog in exchange for your story.

The next day you collect a whole lot of bees in a big bottle. You give the bottle a shake just to get them a bit more annoyed, and then you let them go in the kennel and put a phone book over the door. Imagine your surprise when you look inside and Rover is standing up. A few days later he is mating with chair legs again, and it is not long before he is back to his old self, barking at postpersons, fouling the neighbour's lawn instead of your lounge room and chasing taxis. A Miracle.

(Note: I am being serious now. Bee "therapy" is one of the madder forms of quackery. Just one bee sting can kill a susceptible person, and there are real dangers from other bee products as well. Stay away from it.)

(Twenty years is a long time and this site has buzzed off.)

Garden Spirits & Metaphysical Fairies using Color Therapy Healing
I am told there is a garden outside my house. It must be that place full of strange green vegetably things with the coloured patches on them. Here is a gardening web site after my own heart. First of all, it talks about spirits in the garden, and there's nothing I like more after a hard day at the webface than to relax with some spirits. Or sometimes a beer. The other thing I like about this gardening site is its respect for weeds. I have always adopted a laissez fair approach to gardening, taking the position that if something really wants to grow somewhere, why would you pull it out and plant something that needed constant attention? When the site owner says of weeds: "Policy makers deny the ability to bargain .. alternate states are good for you to feel. Parts are denied and somber thoughts and feelings prevail. I am sturdy, strong against all forces. The way is known now to uphold against foreign forces. Sink the roots deep and deny the very existence of those forces. (feather the root; covering like a web to obscure attack)", I know exactly how they feel. These people also like rocks. I assume that means that they like their spirits on the rocks.

(Sadly, the metaphysical fairies appear to have spirited this site away. PB November 2000))

The Hieros Gamos Part 1: Exorcising Bitter-Sweet Hystery
Easter was a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I would say something about it. (Alright, I should have done it then, not now. Stop nagging.) Here is a page in a wonderful ecofeminist site that gives a complete history of mankind. Oops! I meant "hystery" (or "hystory" or "herstory"). Oops! I meant personkind. Apparently, biodiversity is being threatened by the recent introduction of patriarchy into societies. Back in the olden days when women ran everything and men were just kept for hunting wild vegetables, breeding, killing spiders and putting the bins out on Monday nights there was a lot of biodiversity and rainforest. Since men invented meat eating, football and hysterectomies the world has been going downhill fast, and men don't know how to fix things because they won't ask for directions. It's good that women are taking over again. I may have misunderstood what this site is saying, but then, after all, I am just a man and not imbued with the goddess spirit. Merry meet to you all.

"And when is he going to mention Easter?" you say. I did get a bit sidetracked, but the connection is where the word "Easter" came from. On this page you can find a link to the "99 Names of Eostre". I would have spelled it "Oestre", but I'm just a man. Merry meat to your barbecue.

This site won Loon of the Month. The citation said:

Loon of the Month

As the Quintessence site got its name from something that a feminist ranted at me once, it would be remiss of me not to award the Loon of the Month garland to the scholarship and careful research shown in the Hystery site. Rarely does one come across such a compelling collection of facts and historical accuracy. (Sorry, there I go again. I mean "herstorical". Or is that "hysterical"?) It is wonderful to see how things were if only they had been how things ought to be when things ought to be the way you would like them to be if how you would like things to be was the way things really might have been but probably were not. I am out of my depth here, but that is understandable as I have not yet reached even the status of "dead white male".