The Millenium Project

The project to move all of the things I've written over the years for various publications outside The Millenium Project was a lot bigger than I'd anticipated. The idea was to still have links from here to where the articles are at peterbowditch.com, but my eventual aim is to have everything that I can find that I've written plus any speeches and talks I've given over there. So far I've moved everything published in other outlets and replaced them here with links, but I really had no idea how productive I've been over the years. Also, long experience in the IT industry should have warned me that any project that has computers anywhere will always make jokes of budgets and estimates.

To add to the subtractions from my time (add to subtractions??) I'm about to become a Field Officer for the coming Australian census and I was given very short notice of when the training would take place and how much of it there would be. That all happens in the next few days and after that I have no idea how busy I will be, but my supervisor suggested "very" so I don't know how much time I will have to do hobbying over the next few weeks. The census happens on August 10 but the work doesn't stop then. Also there's the continuing COVID scare to make things difficult for people who have to go from house to house distributing, explaining and collecting papers. I might be fully vaccinated but that doesn't give me total freedom of movement. It's a wait and see situation. I was supposed to be doing ,media work at a car rally this weekend but it's been postponed to August 28 (and might yet be cancelled), and another one next weekend has already been cancelled.

One day I'll be able to plan my life out for more than a few days. I was never this busy before I retired and had a job. I don't know how I ever found the time to go to work.

The TL;DR version of this is that I'll be here when I'm here and not here when I'm not here. But everything will return to 2019 normal one month soon. Have I mentioned that 2019 saw everywhere in flames from bushfires? Maybe go back to 2018 normality.

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

Four for the price of two this week –

In conversation (15/8/2009)
People often ask me how I can maintain my peaceful equanimity when I am having discussions with quacks and charlatans. I tell them it's easy – just be polite, listen to what they have to say, ask reasonable questions and give their answers diligent consideration. Then a conversation like the one below in an alternative medicine forum comes along.

Quack:	Since Gulf War I, the military has been secretly putting an oil-based adjuvant called SQUALENE into certain experimental lots of military vaccines. Just like lab animals, thousands of soldiers given SQUALENE- laced vaccines have developed disabling auto-immune diseases. Independent researchers have found SQUALENE antibodies in these sick soldiers. In 2005, the military admitted that 1,200 military personnel who received anthrax vaccine before going to Iraq recently developed serious illnesses, including memory loss and chronic fatigue.
PB:	I know you just forgot to include references, so I will have to remind you. References, please.
Quack:	like you care
PB:	I didn't think that you would have any. Thanks for confirming my suspicions
Quack:	LOL. Great game isn't it

There you are. See how easy it is to have an intelligent, productive conversation with a true believer.

Squealin' about squalene (29/8/2009)
Forget measles viruses tunnelling through gut walls. Forget mercury making red blood cells so heavy that they sink to the feet and draw oxygen away from the brain. The new deadliness in vaccines is the adjuvant, and you know by just looking at the word that you don't like it. You used to just have to worry about aluminium being an adjuvant (it might be the most widely distributed metal on Earth but we haven't evolved to tolerate it in our bodies) but now there is a new terror – squalene. This is an oil, and we all know that oils are bad for us (except essential oils, which are essential). The fact that this oil is being put into vaccines just confirms the link between Big Pharma and Big Oil that we have all known about since the Rockefellers gave medical schools the monopoly on teaching doctors.

Deadly squalene Oh, yes, we all know that doctors and scientists tell us that squalene occurs naturally in the body and we don't have to worry about injecting it directly into the bloodstream because it gets into the blood through the gut (just after they tell us that measles vaccines can't get through those gaping holes in the gut wall and make our e. coli autistic). They try to tell us that it is an essential chemical for one of the steps in the metabolism of cholesterol but who needs cholesterol? What would you expect from doctors anyway? Big Pharma gives them pens.

But wait. I have a dilemma. This is what I found on a web site selling alternative medicines, and we know it must be true because it hasn't been "approved" by the FDA:

Squalene helps strengthen the immune system. Squalene is already present in our bodies, primarily in the skin. As we age, the levels of Squalene decreases, that is why we need to replenish Squalene in our bodies.

I'm confused. Squalene strengthens the immune system when we eat it and it gets into the blood from inside us but it wrecks the immune system when it gets into the blood from vaccines? I'm going to have to eat some gingko biloba to make my brain run faster so that I can understand this.

But let's get serious for a moment. Adjuvants make things work better, so it is possible to use less of other ingredients. (I lost some friends in the anti-vaccination movement by pointing out that salt is an adjuvant used in the manufacture of chicken soup.) Squalene is used in flu vaccines in Europe, where it has been injected into 40 million people without any problems, but will not be in the US swine flu vaccine. This is just another case of fear mongering by anti-vaccination liars, and in this case there can be no doubt that they know they are lying because the facts are so plain. By the way, when I asked some anti-squalene whiners to explain the quote above from a quackery site I received no answer at all, not even the expected non sequitur.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a rather irrational conversation I had about squalene with a quack. Here is another example of his debating skills:

Quack:	James McCumiskey, author of "The Ultimate Conspiracy: The Biomedical Paradigm," is currently in search of scientific proof for the existence of this novel strain of swine flu virus that could cause a global pandemic and has sent the following email to public health officials and media outlets all over the world:
PB:	It must exist, otherwise anti-vaccination liars wouldn't be accusing Baxter of patenting it.
Quack:	that is hardly an argument for its existance (sic)

See everything that appeared in 2009 here.

Autism research (19/2/2005)
The cause of autism may soon be known. A major research project is now under way, and you can see it here. It consists of an opinion poll which asks the following questions:

What do you think is the main reason for the rise in autism cases?
- More awareness
- Better diagnosis
- Childhood exposure to mercury or other toxins
- In utero exposure to toxins or infections
- Genetics
- Other
- Not sure

To nobody's surprise, the anti-vaccination liars are rallying the troops and getting the vote out, and when I voted the results looked like this:

A bad example of survey design

Science is not a democracy where decisions are made by referendum. It is about reality, not about how people think reality should be. The link "Click here to learn more" leads to a good article telling why polls of this kind are essentially useless, but that won't stop the liars from lying. Nothing has in the past, so why should a disclaimer from the people conducting the poll. You can expect to see the results of this poll quoted all over the anti-vaccination liar web sites and mailing lists within a few weeks.

Autism "research" (2/3/2005)
At 11:00am on March 3, the results of the MSN poll about the causes of autism looked like this:

A bad survey design made worse

You will notice that there has been an additional choice added since the original poll was started. The anti-vaccination liars immediately smelled conspiracy. My reaction was that it made the poll even less scientific and less valid than it was before, as the additional choice ("A combination of factors listed above") is effectively a "Don't know" response and therefore is the same as the existing "Not sure" option. Also, if I remember my Introductory Statistics course correctly, you don't change the questions in a survey half-way through and then call it the same survey.

See everything that appeared in 2005 here.

My original plan was to do lots of stuff here this weekend and nothing next weekend because I would be off journalisting at a car rally, but the rally has been postponed because of COVID travel restrictions (and I am still waiting for confirmation that my accommodation booking has been transferred to the new date) so things have been reversed.

I'm still doing lots of stuff this week, but it's all to do with moving all the things I've written for magazines across to my personal site at peterbowditch.com. It turns out that this is not as trivial a task as I first assumed so I've been as busy as a one-armed banjo player and also flat out like a lizard drinking as we say upover here in Australia.

Also, I'm supposed to spend this weekend getting over any adverse vaccine reactions to my second COVID vaccination shot. While anti-vaccination liars will be saying that death is probably imminent, I've only suffered one of the common aftereffects - fatigue, but sleeping for almost twelve hours seems to have taken care of that. The good news is that I have no trouble finding my car keys now because they stick to my wrist. (Just joking!)

A couple of weeks ago I reported that I had warned a nearby local council about an impending visit by the Vaxxed bus, coming to town to spread lies about vaccines. Well, despite declaring that COVID is a hoax (like all other diseases), the organisers have cancelled the physical tour because of COVID travel restrictions and it will now be done "virtually", whatever that means. The nice thing is that without the tour it will be simply preaching to the choir as they say in Clichéland and people who are not already committed anti-vaxxers won't get to be lied to. Or exposed to clowns religiously avoiding wearing masks like the sane people do.

I'm letting everyone know that there might be a point in the very near future which sees the end to any updates to The Millenium Project. The reason for this pessimism is that I'm booked in for my second AstraZeneca COVID vaccination shot on Friday, July 9, and some very reputable* anti-vaxxers have declared that this is almost a certain death sentence. If I'm dead I can't be updating any web sites. Actually, I will be away on the weekend of July 17-18 because I'll be doing the rally media hobby thing, but I'm reasonably confidant (p<.000000001) that if I'm not back here shortly afterwards it won't be because I've been killed by a vaccine. (I somehow miss the days when any missed weekend would be greeted by an explosion of mouth foam from the likes of the now-dead Mr William P O'Neill declaring that the site had been closed by someone or other.)

Back in April 2019 I mentioned how anti-vaccination liars lie when submitting spurious reports of "vaccine damage" to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Of course, as lying is what they do, nobody should be surprised by this.

Someone has taken a bit of time to examine some more of the lies, and the image below shows some of the things reported as vaccine damage. Some of them are not surprising because there are some deaths there caused by suffocation when co-sleeping and it is an article of faith for anti-vaxxers that nothing kills babies except vaccines and SIDS does not exist. I have a friend whose father did a lot of research into SIDS and "white heat" doesn't quite describe his rage at this particular set of lies.

A friend of mine died suddenly a few days ago. I knew Shelley through our mutual interest in fighting the liars who oppose vaccination and she was one of the smartest and funniest people I've ever known. I'm not real good at writing obituaries so I'll leave it to our mutual friend Peter to say things better than I ever could.

Anne, me, Maureen and Shelley celebrating a court victory over the Australian Vaccination Network

As Shelley had publicly announced her intention to get the COVID vaccine shortly before she died it was inevitable that the anti-vaccination ghouls would leap on this and gloat that the vaccine had killed her. This started even before any autopsy reports had been announced (and they were only announced to her immediately family anyway).

When I predicted that this would happen I said that it would be necessary to be rude to the vultures. Someone criticised me for this and said that rudeness was never appropriate, but how else can you respond to the filth coming out of their mouths?

Because of travel restrictions arising from COVID outbreaks and the limits on numbers of people gathered together I can't attend Shelley's funeral, but I'm sure she would appreciate the real reason for me not being there - the time coincides with the booking for my second COVID vaccination dose. I'll dedicate it to her memory.

In fact it gives me great pleasure to announce that another avenue for "Dr" Sherri Tenpenny to spread lies and disinformation about vaccines has been closed to her. Any day on which something happens to make her miserable is a very good day indeed. The 99,000 people who paid attention to her drivelous ravings will have to look elsewhere to get their daily doses of dangerous lies.