The Millenium Project

I had my first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine yesterday and apparently these are the top side effects reported in the clinical trials:

That's three ticks from me, so I'm having a day of rest instead of doing lots of updating here. As the top side effect of a COVID-19 infection is being dead I'm prepared to put up with the inconvenience of the shot.

As any anti-vaccination liar will tell you, vaccines are never tested with large number of subjects, so I assume the 23,745 subjects in this trial were just something that the vaccine makers made up. One particularly egregious liar told me unequivocally that there have never been any double-blind, placebo controlled randomised trials of any COVID vaccine. Ever. When I referred him to this report on the trial of the vaccine I received he moved the goalposts so fast that the image blurred.

Sometimes, however, the lies are so transparent that you wonder how anyone could believe them. After I had my shot yesterday I found the object below on the floor of my car. It is obviously a 5G nanochip antenna that possibly fell out of the injection wound on my left arm.

And how do I know it's a 5G nanochip with an antenna on the end? Because someone posted a picture of one of these things to Facebook a couple of weeks ago (his was swimming in liquid) and said that it had been extracted from the vaccine in a syringe. The doctor who administered my shot yesterday used a syringe with a needle much too thin to transmit one of these, but he probably knew that I already had five of these tracking devices installed in my car by the man at the tyre shop who moved my tyres onto the new alloy wheels I bought a few weeks ago. Now that Bill Gates knows where I take my car perhaps he can help me solve the problem I have with Windows 10 Updates not installing properly.

Sane people ask "How can anyone believe this sort of rubbish?". I don't know the answer to that. Maybe there isn't an answer.

… I'd been given the RastaZeneca vaccine instead. Would that mean I could listen to reggae music through my 5G implants? I know what would have been recommended to ease any pain at the injection site, and it wouldn't have been paracetamol.

I've written a lot of short articles and news items here over the last two decades. Each week a couple of these pieces will be randomly selected and displayed at the bottom of the week's update. They might not always still be relevant, but that's the way history works.

Some random pieces of history

I've upset someone. Good. (5/1/2013)
Anti-vaccination liar "Dr" Sherri Tenpenny seems to have a streak of cowardice in her. She was the winner of Quote of the Year in the 2012 Millenium Awards, so I posted this Kind and Gentle notification to her Facebook page so that her 30,000+ followers could see that she was receiving the recognition she deserved.

Thirty minutes later it had been removed and I was blocked from commenting on the page. (The reason it says "about an hour ago" is that the screen shot was taken by a friend of mine who had not closed or gone away from the browser window.)

Then things got better. Various people kept posting copies of it or links to the awards page here until "Dr" Tenpenny finally could stand no more. Both her Facebook pages were closed (or made invisible to unapproved people). Gone. No presence on Facebook at all. More than 30,000 loyal fans dumped. All because someone said something she didn't like.

Or was it? Maybe Tenpenny took the pages down because they were not achieving the desired results. Simultaneously with all this it was announced that 2012 had been the worst year for whooping cough in the US since 1955. While this would normally be expected to have anti-vaccination liars wetting their pants with glee, the problem was that while infections were up, only 15 children under the age of twelve months died. This is fewer than what one lunatic let loose in a kindergarten with a gun can do so it probably didn't meet the Key Performance Indicators set at the Tenpenny organisation. Making money by lying about vaccination is one thing, but actual physical results on the ground are the real measure of success.

See everything that appeared in 2013 here.

Chiropractors. Such fun people. (8/8/2015)
Imagine the following scenarios:

You are in a restaurant having a meal and someone gets up from one of the tables, goes into the kitchen, and starts cooking food
You are waiting for your car to be serviced and to fill in the time you pick up a spanner and start doing things to the engine of another car in the workshop
You get bored waiting for your prescription to be filled because the pharmacist is busy, so you go behind the counter and assist him by filling prescriptions yourself
A visitor to a new mother in a hospital performs a medical procedure on the newborn baby, despite having no affiliation with the hospital, or even being a doctor.

"Outrageous!", you say. "Impossible!", you say. But the last one has happened. Several times.

The President-elect of the Chiropractors Association of Australia has been forced to resign from the position because it has been revealed that she had been going into hospitals and "adjusting" new-born babies. She admitted on her Facebook page that she had done it at least once, but since this was revealed several more stories of chiropractors doing the same thing have come to light. Ms Helen Alevaki (who likes to be called "Dr" even tough she is only a chiropractor) works out of a chiropractic business named "chiro4wellness" and apparently specialises in a particular kind of quackery known as "Webster Technique" which appears on the surface to be some sort of obstetric practice which pretends to make birth easier. (Ms Alevaki had her own children at home with a midwife. Of course.) The method of gaining access to hospital patients is to come as a visitor, draw the curtains around the bed, and get cracking on the baby's spine.

If a real doctor did this to someone who was not his patient, in a hospital to which he did not have visiting credentials as a doctor, he would face severe discipline and possibly even loss of his licence to practice. The punishment for a chiropractor is to do two hours of training on record-keeping and the use of social media. And to keep on chiropractising without any further impediment. Chiropractic is, after all, a self-regulated industry, and there is that old cliché about foxes and henhouses.

What is outrageous is that chiropractors are allowed to get anywhere near babies other than the usual interaction allowed to normal parents, friends and relatives. They are not doctors, they are not pediatricians, they have no qualifications to do anything related to babies. (Or anyone else, in my opinion.) That there is an International Chiropractic Pediatric Association should be an affront to all the real doctors who treat children without the need to resort to magic. Oh, did I mention that the ICPA urges caution about vaccinations and suggests that parents ask their doctors such questions as "Where is the scientific evidence showing vaccines are safer than the disease itself? Where is the scientific evidence showing vaccines prevent these diseases?" and "Where is the balance on the pro-vaccine web sites?". The organisation that Ms Alevaki heads is a member of ICPA.

You can read a media report of Ms Alevaki's resignation from her position at CAA here.

In that article you will see mention of a group known as Chiropractic Australia. This has been presenting itself to the world as an association of chiropractors who want to practice some form of evidence-based medicine, getting away from the innate energy and subluxations of traditional chiropractic. The founder of this group has recently said that further research needs to be done into pediatric chiropractic, but until that is done it is better to err on the safe side and keep fiddling with babies' backs. Or, put another way, keep doing the things which have no evidential backing. Just like all the other chiropractors. This is a "profession" which cannot be salvaged.

See everything that appeared in 2015 here.

Back in October 2019 I mentioned that an egregious quack named Barbara O'Neill (that name - a coincidence?) had been stomped on from a great height by the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission and could no longer be a professional naturopath. The outfit she worked for, Misty Mountain Health Retreat, nominally owned by her husband, had been a registered charity at one time with all that implies about tax fraud, sorry, avoidance, sorry, minimisation. I was reminded this week that two years before the HCCC had acted the relevant authorities had cancelled the charitable status. No more tax deductions for "donations", no more spurious claims of being a non-profit organisation working "to promote the prevention or control of diseases in human beings". You can read the ruling here.

Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, was born on April 10, 1755, so it is only fitting that we should commemorate the date by looking at some of the things that he had to say about how healing is accomplished and wellness maintained.

Seeing as how I'm being all historical today, here's an extract from something I wrote a decade ago in 2011.

I must be told on a weekly basis that real doctors treat only symptoms, unlike alternative, holistic medicine men who treat the underlying causes of disease and therefore provide cures. (Strangely, I have also been told that there can be no disease or illness in the absence of symptoms, and when I mention four occasionally asymptomatic medical conditions that are close to me (type 2 diabetes, multiple myeloma, basal cell carcinoma and melanoma) I usually get a response which consists of a pause followed by a repetition of the "fact" that symptoms tell the story.)

In the real world we know that doctors do address the underlying cause of medical conditions and only treat symptoms in the case of self-limiting complaints (antipyretics for the fever associated with colds and flu, ...) or to reduce distress (painkillers, salves and creams for rashes, ...). Treating the symptoms is just the first step before getting on with the real job of fixing the problem.

The form of quackery which is usually offered as the best example of treating the underlying condition rather than just the symptoms is homeopathy. When it is pointed out that symptom treatment is all that there is to homeopathy believers divert to rants about memory of water and Brian Josephson's Nobel Prize (for Physics in 1973, and I don't know what "theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier" have to do with medicine) and how the word "allopath" means real, bad doctor. They do not like it being pointed out that according to the inventor of the term "allopath" it means people who practise medicine according to the theory of four humours and, coincidentally, everyone who is not a homeopath. Do chiropractors, acupuncturists and naturopaths include themselves in the set of "allopaths"? They should. Here is what Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of both the term "allopath" and the "science" of homeopathy had to say:

Medicine as commonly practised (allopathy) knows no treatment except to draw from diseases the injurious materials which are assumed to be their cause. The blood of the patient is made to flow mercilessly by bleedings, leeches, cuppings, scarifications, to diminish an assumed plethora which never exists as in well women a few days before their menses, an accumulation of blood the loss of which is of no appreciable consequence, while the loss of blood with merely assumed plethora destroys life. Medicine as commonly practised seeks to evacuate the contents of the stomach and sweep the intestines clear of the materials assumed to originate diseases.

So the inventor of homeopathy was against purging, cupping and other such practices (all long abandoned by real medicine) but this was because he held the philosophical position that nothing should be done to treat any underlying condition. Here is what you see on the first page of Hahnemann's masterpiece, The Organon of Medical Arts (and not just anywhere on the first page - it is in the first two paragraphs):

The physician's high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed.

His mission is not, however, to construct so-called systems, by interweaving empty speculations and hypotheses concerning the internal essential nature of the vital processes and the mode in which diseases originate in the interior of the organism, (whereon so many physicians have hitherto ambitiously wasted their talents and their time); nor is it to attempt to give countless explanations regarding the phenomena in diseases and their proximate cause (which must ever remain concealed), wrapped in unintelligible words and an inflated abstract mode of expression, which should sound very learned in order to astonish the ignorant - whilst sick humanity sighs in vain for aid. Of such learned reveries (to which the name of theoretic medicine is given, and for which special professorships are instituted) we have had quite enough, and it is now high time that all who call themselves physicians should at length cease to deceive suffering mankind with mere talk, and begin now, instead, for once to act, that is, really to help and to cure.

So according to the inventor of homeopathy, no attempt should ever be made to do anything about any disease other than to treat the symptoms. Remember that the next time someone says that real doctors only treat symptoms. And remember that when someone calls real doctors "allopaths" in order to denigrate them that the only people practising allopathy today are the ones doing cupping, colonic irrigation, detoxification and other standards of the art of quackery.

I spent some years at university studying linguistics and this appears to be written in a language that had its origins among people who live on deserts made up of small interlocking stones. The word for such deserts in the relevant indigenous Australian dialect is "gibber", and Hahnemann's work certainly looks a lot like Gibberish.

(Thanks go to Professor Edzard Ernst for reminding me of the birthday and providing the list above. I had forgotten to put the date in my diary.)

I was wondering when Morgellons could be drawn into the COVID conspiracies, now we find that there are threads in the masks. Who could ever have predicted this?

Speaking of clichés, the media have been reminding me that we are soon to enter "the holy month of Ramadan". I must check with my journalists' union to see if this form of words is mandatory, because I never see references to "the holy week of Passover", "the holy twelve days of Christmas", "the holy weekend of Easter" or "the holy smoke of Rastafarianism".

I like to celebrate Ramadan by having a ham sandwich every day for lunch, eaten of course during daylight hours. This year I am adding to the celebration by allowing my two daughters to dress however they like, associate with whoever pleases them, manage their own private and romantic lives, drive cars, eat what they want and vote in the elections coming later this year. My grandson will not attend a madrass during the holy month and nobody will attach explosives to him or teach him to hate anyone. After the holy month things will return to normal.

Obtained via umpteen iterations of copying so it's impossible to read where to find the artist. Sorry.

It's a weekend of public holidays, COVID lockdowns and extensive traffic jams around my place right now, so if you are home, trapped by the road carnage and looking for something to do you could do a lot worse than watch this movie. Highly recommended!

As a writer, I'm extremely envious of anyone who can make up stuff like this. I wonder what they would make of the Up Helly Aa festival in Shetland, but I suppose they would misconstrue the carrying of flaming torches and wonder where the pitchforks were.

I occasionally get asked why I call anti-vaccination liars "liars" and I always respond "Because they tell lies". The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines has given these creatures many new opportunities to practise the art of lying, but sometimes the lies are so transparent that sane people have to wonder if the liars have actually given up and are just going through the motions. Consider this, which is supposed to be a statement by the insurance company Allianz:

Stretching the bounds of generosity almost to their limits it could possibly be agued that the nonsense ringed in blue is not supposed to be actually part of the Allianz document but simply an explanation of the meaning of "caused by accident" in the policy glossary. I mean, even someone with the intelligence of a nematode can see that it's not using the same typeface, and the random inclusion of ALL CAPS is a very strong indicator of kookiness. This doesn't mean that people won't be deceived, of course, because they will not think beyond the source of the "document" as presented to them.

As similar and much more credible effort has been to produce a letter supposedly from health insurer Bupa saying that they do not cover bad reactions to COVID vaccines.

Note that Bupa do not deny that the letter might have come from their UK office, but the lie was being told in Australia. I somehow doubt that the UK is so different that it could be true, but I've never met an insurance company that didn't want an excuse to avoid paying claims. Doubt benefit is being given, however.