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Winners each receive a tube of haemorrhoid cream and a wire brush applicator. Prize recipients must come to where I live at their own expense to collect their prizes, which will be awarded (including the haemorrhoid cream application) at public ceremonies in a busy commercial district at lunchtime. I will arrange press and television coverage.
Award winners are invited to mention the award on their sites and to display the award graphics.
First Place – The Anus Maximus Award
Unfortunately there seems to be a never-ending supply of anti-vaccination liars. The latest one to appear like an enormous pimple on your nose on the morning of your wedding day is Taylor Winterstein. Taylor, who likes to be called Tay, has a very impressive web site designed to catch the eye and open the wallet. Like all the others of her ilk she has lots of worthless things to sell. She first rose to prominence selling small jars of very expensive rice. This rice had magical healing and wellness powers and was so rare and precious that supermarkets were charging up to $2 per kilogram for it and hiding it on shelves near other products with exotic names like "basmati" and "jasmine". Following some adverse publicity she decided to branch out and run some very expensive seminars and even private consultations advising people of the dangers of vaccines. Unlike some of her anti-vaccination peers who get very upset at criticism, she appears to be totally self-absorbed, almost to the point of narcissism. Did I say "almost"? Sorry! I don't really have to say that any critical comments are immediately deleted from any social media site she has, but that's in the instruction manual for anti-vaccination liars. Tay apparently has Samoan ancestry, but this didn't stop her from promoting her lies to the citizens of that country and then taking no responsibility for (or even notice of, it seemed) the subsequent measles epidemic which killed many children there. She was too busy "poppin" on Instagram, and one has to get one's priorities right.
Taylor ticks all the boxes – no medical training, hand out for money, blocks any criticism, no concern for the collateral damage her lies cause, exploits her family (although to her credit I haven't seen her claim that her children have been damaged by vaccines), hero worship of major figures in the liar community, lies without remorse. She calls her business "Tay's Way Movement" as if she is tapping a groundswell of something and leading a revolution. The name reminds me of another movement, the bowel movement, but unfortunately it's probably going to take more than a wipe and a flush to get rid of her.
Quote of the Year
Meryl Dorey, lying through her teeth.
This is Meryl Dorey, occasional President of the Australian Vaccination-[something or other] Network, someone who blocks anyone on Twitter or Facebook who might disagree with her, removes any critics from mailing lists she manages, spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get a court to censor me and most recently refused me entry to an event to which the media were offered a general invitation.
And one more thing: Freedom of speech does not exist unless we support those we disagree with in expressing their opinions too. Allowing those you agree with to speak and blocking those who you think are wrong is censorship. Plain and simple.
Highly Commended
It should be noted that "Highly Commended" does not mean "Highly Recommended". Quite the opposite, in fact.
Pete Evans is a "celebrity chef" (whatever that is). He doesn't seem to actually run a restaurant anywhere but is one of the hosts of one of Australia's highest-rating television shows. It's a "reality" show about cooking, although Mr Evans doesn't do any of the cooking – that's all done by pairs of amateurs who seem to be selected for the show based on their ability to get a reaction of either hate or love from viewers rather than their ability to cook and serve a meal.
He rose to non-TV fame by promoting something called the "Paleo Diet", a diet which emulates what our primitive ancestors ate back before TV reality programs showed us the importance of plating presentation, before late-night advertisements told us about the necessity for kitchen knives made of super Japanese steel, before the invention of the microwave oven, non-stick cookware or the frozen dinner, before the genetic modifications that gave us kale and cauliflower, before refrigeration and those probes you stick in roasting chickens to see if they are hot enough inside, before Big Pharma created treatments for dysentery, before vitamins came in bottles instead of in food and, well, before we knew any of the things we know today about how to source, prepare and serve food in a hygienic and nutritious manner. Would it be redundant for me to say that Pete Evans has no qualifications in the science of nutrition?
Getting a book banned in Australia is quite difficult these days and there probably hasn't been much banning going on since the censors finally gave up and allowed "Portnoy's Complaint" onto the bookshop shelves despite the risk of society crumbling into a morass of onanism and depravity. Pete Evans has therefore achieved the rare honour of having a book banned and withdrawn from sale. It was titled "Bubba Yum Yum" and contained diet advice for babies that people who knew what they were talking about said put babies at risk of malnutrition and even illness. Remember that there seems to be no restriction on selling books offering quack cures for cancer or lying about the dangers of vaccines, so this book must have really been something special.
He is, of course, opposed to fluoridation. You might think things couldn't get any worse, but the latest news from PeteEvansLand is that he has found a new best friend in arch anti-vaccination liar Robert Kennedy Jr. This goes beyond writing books that might cause parents to feed their children rubbish to associating with people who actively campaign to put children's lives at risk from disease. There are rabbit holes and plug holes but Pete Evans seems determined to go through a worm hole to a place where everyone should be wearing a Full Canvas Jacket.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is famous for a string of movies that I have to admit I've never seen, but that could be because there's no cinema in my town and I'm not much of a movie buff anyway. She has never been nominated for an Academy Award (neither have I, but I have to admit that my film acting is restricted to advertisements which offend people) so she should welcome a nomination here.
Following a long show business tradition of people being famous for one thing branching out and using their name to sell things, she has gone beyond the usual perfumes and clothing lines and has become an "expert" on health matters. For some reason she seems fixated on vaginas. One of her early surprising suggestions was that women should steam their lady bits. The purpose of this wasn't made very clear, nor was the method – squatting naked over a boiling kettle, turning the heat right up in the sauna, hopefully not those wands with steam coming out the end that are used to clean soot and muck off the stonework on old buildings. The general consensus from women I know was that vaginas are essentially self-cleaning so the idea of steam cleaning was treated with a good dose of skepticism. And even a bit of ridicule. Her next project was a range of stone eggs to be inserted for no reason that could be explained in polite company. How these differed in principle from the Ben Wa balls that I've never heard of but are apparently available at a sex shop or Internet near you is a mystery. Maybe Gwyneth's eggs provide more wellness.
All of that was just general wooness. What got Gwyneth over the line for this award was a new product she has for sale. It's a candle. A $75 candle. The prosecution rests.
I was originally going to just give this site an Encouragement Award, but on closer examination it warranted something more substantial. Encouraging its owner to tell more lies would be pointless, because it looks like they are all there already.
How could I not encourage an an anti-vaccination liar web site calling itself "Crazy Mothers? On closer examination it appears to be only one crazy mother who started the site because of some perceived "vaccine damage" to one of her children. The particular mother who owns the site is very proud of her work but apparently not proud enough to identify herself beyond being a "loud redhead", so I would encourage her to tell everyone her name and also say where the profit from her "non profit" company goes. (There is a shop, of course.) Another thing she should be encouraged to do is to provide some truthful information. After all, part of the site's mission is "We work with mothers to help them gain true informed consent, so the decision to vaccinate (or not!) comes from a place of knowledge as opposed to fear" so it might be useful to drop the fear mongering and lies and actually say something that might help a parent make a "decision to vaccinate". Yes, I know that any suggestion that the site might contain anything that would help someone make an "informed consent ... to vaccinate" is itself a lie, but lying is what anti-vaccination liars do. It's their raison d'être.
I do approve of the name Crazy Mothers though. It's rare to see someone so open and almost boastful about the insanity of their ideas and actions.
Encouragement Awards
Climate change deniers – All of them
This is a general award to encourage climate change deniers everywhere to remove themselves from civilised society, or even better, from the gene pool. Some might say that using the Internet meme "Die in a fire" is tasteless because people have actually died in the fires burning across Australia at the time these awards were made, but those deaths can be directly attributed to lack of action by organisations and politicians who reject the science of a changing climate for political, ideological or financial reasons. Some might say that suggesting that anybody should die for anything is wrong, but when the environment, wildlife, towns, livelihoods, and society itself are under threat due to the inactions and actions of a group of people then maybe that group should join in the suffering.
Another Internet meme is "Get in the sea". As the residents of Malacoota in Victoria had to gather on the beach and be lifted off by the Navy, maybe this is a suitable thing to say to the deniers.
Climate change deniers have moved into equal first place with anti-vaccination liars on my scale of contempt. They offer nothing positive to the rest of us, just a lot of negatives, pain and damage.
Note: A very small number of the Australian fires were lit by arsonists. The message is for them too.
Anti-vaccination liars – All of them
Another group that should be encouraged into extinction is the vile collection of creatures who insist in the face of all science and reason that vaccines are always harmful. The get offended when I ask them how many dead children have to be in a pile in front of them to trigger a spontaneous orgasm but why should anyone have a problem with offending child killers?
Here's a suggestion for them. Find an isolated island to repeat the experiments conducted on Gruinard Island off Scotland during the 1940s, but instead of just using anthrax cover the island with a slurry of the infectious agents causing measles, pertussis, cervical cancer, polio, chicken pox, diphtheria and anything else you can think of. Make sure there's also parvovirus and feline enteritis there for pets. Then go there and live there and never come back, leaving the rest of the sane world to get on with improving the health, welfare and lifespans of the children of sane parents. Children of the anti-vaxxers should of course be left in the safety of responsible people before their parents depart for the island. We don't wish any harm to come to the children and there are plenty of people who would gladly take care of the kids and ensure they were protected from preventable diseases.
Gruinard Island
Poor Alex Jones needs some encouragement after the events of 2019. He was ordered to pay damages to the parents of the children murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012. "Why should he pay damages when he didn't do the shooting?" you ask. "How much did the gun masturbators at the NRA have to pay?" you ask. Well, Jones was one of the leading campaigners claiming that the atrocity was a "false flag" operation run to get stricter gun controls. He declared that the children in the pictures were actors. He accused the parents of lying about even having children, let alone murdered children. At the time, people described him as "pond scum" and "a turd", terms which are highly derogatory to both pond scum and sewage.
The next time someone plans a school shooting I would hope they contact Jones first, because I would encourage him to act as a human shield to protect the kids. After all, if these events aren't really mass murders and nobody ever really gets shot he won't be in any danger, will he? And his hide is probably bulletproof anyway.
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