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January 16, 2021 Happy New Year. Happy New Year (16/1/2021)
The 2020 Millenium Awards (16/1/2021) But first, just to get you in the mood for the announcements. Because of the ongoing COVID emergency I had to cancel this year's celebration event with its Red Carpet and legendary Afterparty. As with cancellation of other award ceremonies such as the Oscars and BAFTAs couturiers and cocaine dealers are devastated, but It's not just tourist spots and CBD sandwich shops who have had to suffer the pain.
Oh, noes!!! AVN does a flight to fantasy. (16/1/2021) Free speech champion, Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination-[lies, lies, lies] Network, has announced that following some crackdowns by various social media sites, the AV-[fu]N is leaving Facebook and heading for the cesspits occupied by other examples of human filth. Of course, Ms Dorey's total commitment to free speech has seen her block me from Facebook pages, remove me from mailing lists, block me on Twitter and spend a year trying to get a court to remove my freedom of speech but if you took away her hypocrisy there would be a massive hole in her personality.
The AVN Committee has made the decision not to remain on Facebook where we are already shadow-banned and suppressed for sharing factual, referenced information on the harms and ineffectiveness inherent in our one-size-fits-all vaccination program. We cannot support a platform that is so blatant about silencing us and so many others. But later We will, however, no longer be responding to any messages sent to the FaceBook page nor will we be replying to comments except for the rare FaceBook Lives we put up and of course, Under the Wire every Saturday morning at 10 AM AEST So they are leaving, except when they are not leaving. To misquote Paul Simon "I am leaving, I am leaving but the liar still remains".
The AVN Committee has made the decision not to remain on Facebook where we are already shadow-banned and suppressed for sharing factual, referenced information on the harms and ineffectiveness inherent in our one-size-fits-all vaccination program. We cannot support a platform that is so blatant about silencing us and so many others. Ms Dorey and her ilk just can't help themselves. There is a theory that they have to include lies in everything they say just to meet the daily quota. Homeopaths diluted and succussed (16/1/2021) With great sadness I have to report that the UK Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care has suspended the accreditation of the Society of Homeopaths. Oh, sorry, did I say "sadness"? I meant "joy".
In February 2020 accreditation was renewed, subject to a Condition that included making its position statements clear that registrants must not practise CEASE, practise or advertise adjunctive therapies that are incompatible with Society registration, or provide advice on vaccination. But ... We found the Conditions were not met and that the SoH did not fully meet a number of our Standards. In view of the recurrent nature of the concerns, and that several Conditions had already been imposed on the SoH since February 2020, we decided to suspend accreditation. Unfortunately the suspension is only for a year, and I doubt that it will be announced to the customers of homeopaths or will make any difference to what homeopaths do or say. As many (a majority? most) of them are quite aware that what they do is both medical and financial fraud they don't need accreditation to carry on as usual. There is a reasonable argument that instead of suspending the quacks for a year the suspension should have been for a nanosecond (or whatever short period of time they are measuring at CERN these days). Applying the Law of Infinitesimals would make this a much more powerful penalty. Well, it "works" for homeopathic "medicines". And speaking of CERN ... (16/1/2021)
Are they barking mad? (Rhetorical question) (16/1/2021) Back in August last year I mentioned how kooks decided that "5G" as used to describe acceleration forces was the same thing as "5G" when talking about telecommunications. They have now gone one better and have proved that 5G and Covid-19 are intimately connected, something long suspected in Conspiracy World.. To support this the circuit diagram for the nanochips to be included in the COVID-19 vaccine has been discovered. "5G FREQ" is right there, so nothing can be denied.
Oh, and one other thing - it's actually a schematic for a pedal used to switch on a particular effect for an electric guitar. Or so the "skeptics" say. They point to the footswitch and ask why one of those would be necessary on a tiny chip floating around the body, but that's just camouflage. The guitar effect is supposedly called "metal" and everyone knows that "metal rock" is the invention of Satan and therefore fits in easily with the Gates conspiracy to control the world through 5G and vaccines. And you can't deny that "5G" must relate to the five points of a pentagram. (I'm practising making things up.) I know this might be something planted in relevant places to confuse and excite loons, but I've been around long enough to know that they will believe anything. Facebook Fouls Up (are you sure you meant to type "Fouls"?) (16/1/2021) In December 2013 and again in January 2014 anti-vaccination liars and associated vermin went on a rampage of complaining to Facebook. The complaints relied on Facebook's opaque yet flexible interpretation of their "community standards". Several people, myself included, had their accounts temporarily suspended. It looks like it's started again. I was typing something into Facebook on January 2 and this popped up. There is always the possibility that this attracted the attention of the famous Facebook "algorithm" and wasn't triggered by a complaint, but I know that in the past the kooks have resorted to trawling history to look for things to whinge about. Happily, the post was restored after I disagreed with its removal, but November 2016? Now consider this image of a Facebook thread from January 2, 2021 (is the date a coincidence?). You might notice that it seems that "Carol Thompson" has twice replied to something that I said, but in neither case are my words there. That's because she was stabbed in the feels and had to complain. Here is my first comment in a different context And the second comment to which she replied before complaining:
And by the way, someone (not me) reported "Carol Thompson's" two messages mentioning me to Facebook for harassment and her objections were upheld and her comments stayed there for public viewing. "Community standards". Yeah, right. Something new that's actually something old
December 19, 2020 It's the season to be jolly. So do it!! (19/12/2020)
This time last year there were massive bush fires all over my state and my little country town was almost cut off from the rest of the world (we weren't at risk from fires, but the roads in and out were). We all thought that things couldn't get worse, but of course they did. We are hoping for a better 2021 (even though it seems to say "2020 won"). I would like to thank all the visitors to this site over the year and wish you a very Merry Christmas, and I hope you all have a better year next year than this one. With more than 600,000 visitors during the year I can't complain too much about the work I put in to what is just a hobby. People who attach a religious meaning to the season are quite welcome to do so, but Christmas is a secular event around my place centred on friends and family. Fundamentalist atheists who want to complain about me using "Christmas" instead of the anonymous "Xmas" should direct their ire to devnull@ratbags.com where their complaints will be comprehensively ignored. Christians who object to the To avoid offending anyone I'll just say that if your particular Solstice celebration or anything else you celebrate around this time falls on a different date then take this one as a bonus. And Happy Festivus to all. I'll be taking a break, and hopefully will be back on or about January 16 with the annual Millenium Awards. As I say every year - drink sensibly, drive safely and do them on different days. Be careful what you ask for (19/12/2020)
Get ready for the lies (19/12/2020) One of the very few things that anti-vaccination liars are good at is lying about vaccines. With the arrival of vaccines against the current COVID-19 plague we can expect a ramping up of the lying and the distortion of facts. I was once told by a supporter of non-medicine that any death from any cause during a clinical trial means that the drug, vaccine or whatever is too dangerous to be used. This applies even if the deaths are in the placebo group, and we all know that vaccines are never tested against an inert placebo if they are even tested at all. In response to one of those "they are never tested for safety" claims I once pointed someone to more than 7,000 papers in medical journals reporting on vaccine safety tests and was asked to prove that they weren't all just reports of the same test, and also challenged to read them all. Of course, no clinical trials are ever carried out unless you count the >400,000 subjects in the trials of the Salk polio vaccine or the >30,000 in trials of Gardasil HPV vaccine. But what are facts when you are talking about vaccines except propaganda from Big Pharma? The liars are having trouble convincing people that there are no trials of any COVID vaccine because news of the trials is everywhere, although they have transferred their "too many too soon" idiocy to "too quick too soon", ignoring the fact that the vaccine manufacturers have had a lot of experience with fast development (they do it every year for influenza) even if they haven't had to work with this sort of disease since the SARS epidemic of 2003. (SARS was caused by a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 The current version is SARS-CoV-2.) If such a thing could be funny, I think the funniest anti-vaccination lie I've heard so far is a retread of the old "Catholics can't use vaccines" nonsense that was hit on the head by the Vatican in 2005. (Meryl Dorey from the Australian Vaccination Network lied about this under the headline "Vatican says, "Parents must oppose vaccines from human foetal remains".) And of course the earlier "Muslim Babies -- MMR Jabs have traces of Pork" lie spread by morons in Britain in 2004. The new one is that because the vaccine uses an animal or even maybe human cell line in its manufacture it can't be taken by vegans without violating their principles. Anti-vaccination liars test the concept of "nadir" and the size of the universe, because even if you go down as far as seems possible you still wouldn't have reached the depths of their depravity. However, but and another "however". The FDA has admitted that people suffered Severe Adverse Events in the COVID-19 trials. An official document released on December 17 contains the following paragraph:
So, if you get the vaccine be sure to stay indoors during thunderstorms or your heart might start to beat irregularly. And don't get old. Who knows where these things might lead? A perfect commentary on 2020 (19/12/2020) December 12, 2020 Advances in Chiropractic. (OK, I'm joking.) (12/12/2020) Back in March 2019 I invented the cliché "As useless as the Chiropractic Board of Australia" and 21 months later it's probably time to see if anything has changed.
What connects the cliché and the number is that the change in the CBA's policies, powers, control of the chiropractic "profession" and concern for patient welfare is exactly equal to zero. As it was zero before anyway I suppose we could say that it has increased greatly, and maybe even exponentially (that word loved by people who don't know what it means - in this case that y=0 for all values of x in the equation y=0x). Periodically some nonsensical or dangerous procedure by chiropractors (isn't that everything?) comes to the attention of the relevant health authorities and action is promised to wipe out the offending practice. In 2013 it was cracking the spines of babies and young children; in 2019 it was internal adjustment of the coccyx bone in children (something which many (most?) of us would consider to be sexual abuse). Have chiropractors stopped doing these things? We'll never know because the advice from the CBA was to maintain a low profile until the publicity blew over. A recent investigation of chiropractors' web sites in Australia revealed large numbers of them promoting the Webster Technique, a procedure to assist in realigning the foetus in the case of possible breech birth. How the uterus is related to "spinal health" is a mystery known only to chiropractors, but nobody is supposed to do it any more because it is against the rules. You might notice that I had no difficulty finding a definition on the web site of a supposedly "professional" chiropractic oversight group. Other sites promoted turmeric as a treatment for cancer, "cupping therapy" to "activate the immune system", manipulation to treat plagiocephaly ("flat head"), fixing subluxations to "boost the immune system" and to treat asthma and constipation. Even members of the board of the CBA offer untested and unlikely treatments. But why go on? Chiropractic can treat anything that a "patient" might have, and it all depends on the imagination and mendacity of the practitioner.
So here's my prediction, and it's the same one I've made in the past. Three years from now chiropractors will still be advertising that they offer supposedly banned treatments. They will still be talking about subluxations as if they exist. They will still be offering to boost the immune system, cure asthma and other medical conditions, still massaging the abdomens of pregnant women to turn babies the right way up, still pretending to be real medical practitioners (and insisting on being addressed as "Doctor"), still doing all the things they do today. Not one chiropractor will have been deregistered or have had any action taken against him by the Chiropractic Board of Australia (unless convicted of an unrelated crime resulting in imprisonment, and maybe not even then). It will be business as usual, just as it has been since DD Palmer invented the scam in 1895. There is only one way to correct the excesses of chiropractic, and that is to close it down and stop pretending that it has anything to do with health or medicine. There is no Blood Letting Board of Australia because the world has moved on from that dangerous and useless practice. It's about time we moved on from the quackery of 1895 as well.
Quintessence Nook (12/12/2020) December 2000 provided much debate about the coming year. Were we to call it "two thousand and one", "two thousand one" or the awful "twenty one"? Pedants who had been silent since the previous December reemerged with their arguments about when millennia, centuries and decades began, again pointing out that we start counting from one, not zero. A general agreement was reached that following the tradition of "eighties" and "nineties" we should continue to say that we were living in the "naughties". It was hot in Sydney and cold in Utqiagvik. (This was no surprise, it's always cold in Utqiagvik.) Here's some quintessence from December 2000.
This site won Loon of the Month. The citation read:
Every writer's perennial problem (12/12/2020)
Missing in action (16/1/2021) I've temporarily removed the part at the bottom of the page that showed the Book of the Week and a list of some selected books. Something seems to have changed at Amazon and a large number of message interchanges between the web site host and Amazon were slowing down the time it took for this page to load. We have our best people working on it and hope to find an answer sometime soon. Or whenever. You can click here to see everything that has appeared on the front page over the last 22 years. |
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