Updates made to The Millenium Project in November 2019

Young Scientist Awards (2/11/2019)
It's that time of the year again, so I made the long drive through a kangaroo and wombat slalom to give a short speech at the Young Scientist Awards.

You can read the speech here.

Concentrated, triple-distilled essence of filth (2/11/2019)
It was Halloween near my place a couple of days ago (it was probably Halloween near your place at around the same time, but this is my site and I'm entitled to be a bit parochial). Because of the diabetes I don't usually have any sweets around the house and because of having a cold I didn't get to the shops to buy any, so I suppose that because of the location of my flat I was a bit lucky that no goblins turned up at my door to be disappointed.

Other people, however, were getting very well prepared for when the neighbourhood kids turned up.

Sorry, did I say "people"? As anyone who would think of this does not deserve membership in the human race, please read "turds" instead.

This woman claims to be a registered nurse, but as the health authorities have no record of her we can assume that she is lying about either her name or her job. She might still be a nurse, but obviously she is aware of the consequences of suggesting an act of bioterrorism and the possible, make that probable, effect on her continued employment. I'm not sure what is the more frightening – that she might be a neighbour preparing to endanger your children or that she might be the nurse who attends you in hospital.

She has been posting anti-vaccine lies on her Facebook profile for some time, but the profile has now been deleted. Not only does she lie either about her name or about being a nurse (or possibly both), but faced with a bit of criticism of her disgusting activities she has run away. Cowards do that.

And of course the anti-vaccination liars who "liked" her previous posts and even this one are now declaring that she is really an agent provocateur planted by the pro-vaccine crowd in order to make them look bad. The funny thing is there is no reason for sane people to do that, because they reveal their evil nature to the world in almost anything they say or do.

Oh, and in case you think that this really is an isolated case of a single rogue anti-vaccination liar acting alone and suggesting something that would offend the rest of the world, remember that in 2014 the National Vaccine Information Center wasn't the least bit concerned about Halloween vandalism. See the story here.

Something else for Halloween (2/11/2019)

See more of Cectic here

Somebody stop him with the Halloween jokes (2/11/2019)

See more from Scott Hilburn here

He won't stop (2/11/2019)

See more from Mark Parisi here

It keeps happening (2/11/2019)

See more from Dan Piraro here

Aaaaaarrrrgghh! Make it stop! (2/11/2019)

See more from David Coverly here

Note from Mum (9/11/2019)
I was planning on writing a story about my visit to the MindBody$pirit Festival but I have been distracted.

Smoke from bush fires in Eastern Australia is dropping ash on New Zealand.

I live in Area 10

The usual bullshit is coming from climate change deniers. I have suggested that they be given hand-held fire extinguishers and then dropped from helicopters into the worst of the fires, but there will be time for torches and pitchforks after the crisis has been averted. Of course, if all the areas in red aren't reduced to cinders in a few days the deniers will be shouting "Hoax", but I wonder why we still pay any attention to the rantings of  insane people.

Back next week. I hope.

Public Service Announcement – filth is coming (9/11/2019)
I thought I'd give everyone a heads-up about a film that's about to be shown across Australia. Screenings start in early December but you will need time for Ebay to deliver the sick bags to catch the vomit before you sit down to watch it. The film is "Vaxxed 2 – What You Don't Know" and is a sequel to an excrescence named "Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe" that polluted the world in 2016. You can see something about that if you go back in time to March, but be warned – unless your sick bags have arrived you should wear a raincoat and put some plastic sheeting down to avoid damage to your carpet before you watch the video.

Once again the venues that will be showing the film will be kept secret until just before the shows start. According to the organisers, the Australian Vaccination[-this week's name] Network, "Due to the well-orchestrated threats of violence and abuse that come from the pro-censorship community, the exact venue will not be announced until the day of the screening". There have of course never been any threats of violence in the past, but liars have to tell lies otherwise they feel disappointed with themselves.

Here is the trailer for the film. Even this short exposure raises the risk or esophageal damage from reflux, so you should probably drop a couple of antacid tablets before watching. I would still recommend the raincoat and plastic sheeting just to be sure, though.

People are being asked to pay good money to see the film, so I'm keeping my eye on YouTube and some torrent sites and will bring it to the world for free (cheap at half the price) as soon as I can.

Speaking of the new "Vaxxed" (9/11/2019)
Someone at a screening in the US took a photo of the screen and proudly posted it to an anti-vaccination liar page on Facebook. Apparently citing Hitler makes these creatures feel good because he seemed to agree with something they say. It probably doesn't need to be said but I'll say it anyway – they equate vaccination to the Holocaust but seem quite comfortable with quoting the architect of that atrocity when it suits them.

Luckily I kept a sick bag from the last time I was on a plane, but that was the only one I had so I'm waiting for the delivery from Ebay.

See more from Robert Leighton here

Possible midweek update coming.
I'd planned to do a lot more this week, with a book review (a book about climate change, written by an actual scientist who knows things) and a report on the MindBody$pirit Festival plus the normal monthly check and fix for broken links but a family birthday and the bush fires around the place have forced a change of plans. The birthday party just took time, but smoke from the fires is causing drug-resistant effects on my breathing. I'm lucky, though, because I just get weepy eyes and a bit of shortness of breath, not asthma. People can die from that.

Smoke visible in the park outside my front door. This is coming from a fire 100 kilometres away which has already burnt 123,000 hectares of forest. And yes, the sky is really grey, not blue.

Liars gotta lie (16/11/2019)
An anti-vaccination liar with a camera walks into a medical practice. No, this isn't the start of a joke, it's a story about the depths to which anti-vaccination liars will go to advance their deranged agenda.

Video © 9News of course and I thank them profusely.
Mr O'Toole posted the entire seven minute video of his visit but YouTube took it down before I had a chance to download it, so this will have to do.

The moron involved, Jeff O'Toole, didn't want to talk to the TV news people, but there can be no doubt about his liar credentials. Here is a screenshot from his Facebook page. (The woman in the photo is always referred to as Allona Liar. She is not happy about this, but what can you do? A day when a vaccine opponent is upset is not a wasted day.) You can see something about these ridiculous vigils here.

Impersonating a government representative is a crime (see the relevant legislation here, or click here for the part specifically related to this action). Now, will the Therapeutic Goods Adminstration bring down the full force of the law on this person? Don't ask silly questions. The TGA is probably the most useless government instrumentality in Australia (if you leave out the ones who should be doing something about climate change) and all they ever seem to do to quacks and people committing medical fraud is to slap them on the wrist with a feather and say "Please stop that". If they can't stop chiropractors cracking babies' necks or naturopaths pretending to be doctors why are they going to spend any time or resources doing something about a liar taking down posters while pretending to work for them?

More from poTAYto (16/11/2019)
Back in February I mentioned that a Tay Winterstein, famous across the world as the handbag for a professional footballer who can't get a job playing football in Australia, was running a scam to extract money from gullible people. One of the places where she peddled her anti-vaccination lies was Samoa, which is currently in the midst of a measles epidemic that has resulted in the deaths of several children. It almost goes without saying that she is denying any responsibility (or even concern) and anyone who suggests that she might take a look at the consequences of her actions is quickly blocked and their comments deleted.

She claims to be part of a "movement" that is going to change the world, and this movement does not take negativism lightly. (She has probably read The Secret and believes what it says.) She decided to make her position clear.

Have I mentioned that a few weeks ago she said she was leaving all social media immediately and wouldn't be coming back? I guess she made an exception for Facebook. Or maybe she hadn't told enough lies that week and needed to get to her quota.

I thought I'd make a Kind & Gentle reply to that in a humorous fashion, so I posted the following response to that message:

When I summon myself you'll know all about it. There will be smoke and the smell of sulphur and music by Modest Mussorgsky. (Nobody ever called ME modest!)

And added a link to this excellent video.

No, I won't tell you the name of the film where this appeared.

Obviously my attempt at humour was too subtle (or maybe neither Tay nor any members of her "fam" recognised the source of the video or possibly even the music in it) so my comment was soon deleted, along with anything else even mildly critical of Tay and her activities. Any mention of Samoa and measles brought very swift action.

So there you have it – no amount of positive thinking can survive even the smallest fragment of negativity. It must be very scary to have to live your life in a bubble of praise, frightened that the tiniest flaw in the bubble will destroy you.

Oh, and while I usually don't approve of making fun of people's names (you can see an expert working on my name here, but they just made me laugh), I'm just following a long tradition going back to when she first appeared of calling her poTAYto. I don't know if it upsets her, but she probably stays well away from anywhere where she might see it. Those places are all outside the bubble.

And while we're here – Tay has said several times how much she hates censorship. Of course she does, but only when done by other people. That's what bubbles are for.

And is she feeling even the least bit sorry about the epidemic in Samoa, which has caused the government there to declare a state of emergency? I'll leave you to judge for yourself.

I can't go to the movies! Sob! Sob! (23/11/2019)
A couple of weeks ago I warned about an upcoming plague of screenings of a movie filled with lies. The organisers invited the media to come to the screening sessions, so how could I not ask for a ticket?

Hello Aneeta,

I'm a freelance journalist (MEAA member 2011631) and I would like to take up your offer to attend a screening of Vaxxed II. Because I live in the country (Oberon) the only one I can reasonably get to is December 5 in Newcastle.

Thank you in advance, and I'm looking forward to seeing the film.

(The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is the union covering journalists, actors, musicians and everyone else who serves to entertain or inform the public.)

I received a reply from Meryl Dorey, the woman who wasted a year of my life in an attempt to get a court to prevent me from speaking about her vile anti-vaccination activities:

Dear Peter,

Nice try. Members of the Australian Skeptics who have a history of openly abusing families of the vaccine injured as not welcome at these events.

So I thought I had better politely respond. I didn't bother to address the claim that "Members of the Australian Skeptics have a history of openly abusing families of the vaccine injured" because this lie has been refuted on more occasions that I've had pizza for dinner. Of course, as skeptics we await any evidence of vaccine injury but so far none has been forthcoming.

Thank you.

I will be attending two functions with other journalists that week (one of them the MEAA Christmas party) and I'm sure I'll get some good laughs when I tell people that someone who loudly proclaimed "Fight against censorship!" on her organisation's Facebook page has refused a journalist entry to an event to which the media were invited.

Have a good Christmas. The parents of the children dying of measles in Samoa won't be doing that.

And in case you think I'm being misleading about "Fight against censorship!", remember that this is the woman who has banned or blocked me from several mailing lists, from following her on Twitter or from commenting on the AVN's Facebook page. Dictionaries carry a picture of Meryl Dorey next to the entry for "hypocrisy".

And speaking of measles ... (23/11/2019)

No, I don't know who drew it, but I will acknowledge them if someone tells me who they are

It never stops, does it? (23/11/2019)
Did you know that the Google search engine now only contains links to sites that say that the trails behind aircraft are just condensation of the water produced by burning hydrocarbon fuel in the engines and have banned any links to sites revealing the truth about chemtrails? I didn't know this fact until I read the headline:

Google Has Scrubbed Their Search Engine Of All Opposing Views On Chemtrails, Showing Only Results That Promote Official Gov' t Narrative

It had to be in big, bold capital letters so that people wouldn't miss it, but on the web site where I saw it it was so big I had to step back from the screen to read it.

Of course, I have always been aware of the truth, and I have the sign and t-shirt to prove it, but this new censorship is concerning. Next thing you know, Google will be delisting 9/11 Troofer sites, cancer curers, Holocaust, vaccination and climate change skeptics and other groups who challenge the orthodoxy. And how will we find out the truth then?

And yes, I'm being sarcastic.

See more Jesus and Mo here

I'm so excited (and I'm not even a song from the disco era) (23/11/2019)
One of my New Year Resolutions for 2015 was to get on with producing the next volumes of "Things I Think About", an anthology of things I've written over the years. I got a bit sidetracked in 2015, what with moving out to the country and reinventing everything about my life, but I've finally got around to keeping that resolution, and Volume 2 will be released in the next week or two (depending on how long it takes for proofreading and remembering how to do the Kindle stuff at Amazon). Other resolutions from 2015 such as spending two hours every day practising the guitar, not eating KFC and training for the half-marathon will be resurrected in 2020, as they are every year.

Watch this space!!

The book is almost here! (30/11/2019)
Volume 2 of my collected scribblings covering material published here and elsewhere between July 2003 and December 2004 has made it through the assembly and proofreading stages and is now in the process of meandering through Amazon's maze of twisty little passages before becoming available for sale. It's a Kindle ebook right now, but might make it to a paperback real book after I get over the stress of putting it all together.

In one of those marvels of progress in technology, the books I published in 2014 went straight from Microsoft Word to Kindle with all pictures exactly where I wanted them to be. The 2019 version of Amazon's Kindle creator ignores all positioning and word wrapping and makes everything look like a dog's breakfast. I've spent most of the last week removing all non-essential pictures and figuring out how to get the remaining ones to appear in approximately meaningful locations. (Some were displaced by a couple of paragraphs by the translation process!). Luckily I spent many years doing maintenance and debugging of badly documented computer programs and a few years at university studying the internal workings of the brains of rats and first-year students so I am well equipped to solve problems by inferring from limited or inadequate data. The next book will take a lot less time now I know how things work.

You can get your very own copy here.

Found anonymously on Facebook, so I don't know who I stole it from.

Just when you think we have reached Peak Stupid ... (30/11/2019)
A little while ago the sane world was taken aback when it was announced that the state of Ohio had legislated that school children could not be penalised for providing wrong answers in assignments if the answers were based on firmly held religious principles. This was obviously an attempt to get the mind rot of creationism back into schools, with the inevitable result of producing scientifically illiterate adults. (A few years ago Toyota moved a manufacturing plant out of a state that had allowed creationism to be taught in schools as if it had some relation to reality. The company said they could not afford the risk of employing badly educated workers.)

Things have now got worse, because while creationism just restricts learning, a new law will result in women dying. The new law says that doctors must reimplant ectopic pregnancies or face prosecution for facilitating abortion. Ectopic pregnancy is when the embryo starts to grow somewhere other than in the uterus (most commonly in one of the fallopian tubes). There is no way that the foetus can develop to full term and such pregnancies threaten the life of any woman unfortunate enough to have it happen to them. The only treatment is surgery to remove the embryo. It is simply not possible to then reimplant it into the uterus. Not just difficult, not just unlikely to result in a full term baby – not possible at all with any expectation of anything other than further complications, the possible death of the mother and the need for more surgery. Only someone totally unfamiliar with how the human body works could even suggest it. Or someone so blinded by religious bigotry that they think that dead women are a small price to pay when you believe that God demands that every conception results in a birth.

Free-range lunatics outside the asylum.

You can read the story here. Where the article says "Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science" it is speaking the truth. This could go down in history like the attempt to legislate squaring the circle which would have resulted in π having to be exactly equal to 3.2 (Bill #246 which came before the Indiana General Assembly in 1846). That attempt failed after much mocking and ridicule, but there seems to be more madness in the world these days.

See more from Jen Sorensen here

Speaking of people who want others to die ... (30/11/2019)
The horror of the measles epidemic in Samoa continues.

The number of dead children will have increased by the time you read this. So let's look at what anti-vaccination liars have been saying about this tragedy.

This comment comes from "Australia's leading vaccine researcher", Meryl Dorey of the constantly-renamed Australian Vaccination-xxx Network. (Yes, the "xxx" is deliberate – anti-vaccination liars are as offensive as porn. More so, actually.) It is typical of the nonsense coming from these creatures.

The two children who "died within minutes of receiving their MMR vaccine" did not die from any effect of any vaccine. They were administered a totally different medication by mistake and the people responsible have faced criminal charges over the deaths. Ms Dorey knows this but her hatred of vaccines prevents her from acknowledging the facts. And to any thinking person the increase in infections from a highly infectious disease following suspension of vaccination against that disease would come as no surprise. Ms Dorey has described measles as "benign" and says that the name comes from the Sanskrit for "gift from the Goddess", so why is she now admitting that "children are dying from measles"? Surely "Australia's leading vaccine researcher" couldn't be exhibiting ignorance. Or hypocrisy.

I could show you more of the lies and nonsense from clowns like Taylor Winterstein (who still denies any responsibility for her actions in the country earlier this year) or the people who are sending Vitamin A to Samoa or the liars who reported a GoFundMe fundraising campaign to provide medicines to Samoa as being fraud (the appeal was stopped for a short period, but GFM finally saw the lie for what it was and reinstated the account) or any of the other actions of the turds posing as humans who have slithered onto the bandwagon but I'm going to keep them around in case I need to induce vomiting. The drought has killed my ipecac plants and my local apothecary is running low on supplies for the same reason, so I'm pleased to have an alternative. Alternative medicine, you might say.

Or, put another way – I'm suffering from mental and emotional exhaustion from the constant stream of dreadful news from Samoa. One good thing is that the Samoan Prime Minister has come out with an unambiguous statement supporting vaccination and has publicly censured the quacks and parasites who have been trying to profit from the outbreak. Mandatory vaccinations for school attendance and criminal charges against quacks look like happening.

In a 1646 book called Pseudodoxia Epidemica Sir Thomas Browne had this to say about "Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers, and Charlatans":

For their Impostures are full of cruelty, and worse than any other; deluding not only unto pecuniary defraudations, but the irreparable deceit of death.

Describes anti-vaxxers and quacks as if it were written yesterday.

See more SMBC here