the 111 experience of J'lahn
Could there be a more perfect number than 111? Whichever way you look at it the mysteries remain. Upside-down, backwards or mirror-reversed it maintains its purity of form. Add the numbers together and you get 3 - the number of digits in 111. Multiply the digits and, no matter in which order, you get 1, the fundamental digital component of 111. Taken as a binary number it means 7, which if you multiply by 111 then subtract 111 gives 666 (the last three digits on Bill Gates' Visa card). Take one of the "6" digits from the last calculation, insert it within 111 and you get 1611, the year that the Bible was published. Add one of the "6" digits to 111 and you get 711, the sign of eternal opening hours. And don't be fooled by the tale that "www" stands for "world wide web". Just listen carefully to yourself when you sound out "1 1 1" and you will know the real meaning of the Internet.

The owner of this site was not happy and wrote to me. You can see his words here.

Sadly, this site has gone into the Great Bitbucket in the Sky, but I thought it rated a mention simply because of the quality of the site owner's correspondence.

MetaSyn Media Master Access
When I was young, I had a neighbour named Mr Chandler. Nobody ever knew his first name, or where he came from. He believed that his choice of career was predestined by his name so he had a shop selling bits of sailing boat rigging and, when asked, would say "A Chandler must chandle". As we lived 800 kilometres from the sea business was not brisk, but he made enough money to indulge his one vice. Every Friday afternoon he would lock up the shop and go to the local hotel, where he would consume exactly one dozen beers, never more or less. His progress back to the shop afterwards was known to one and all as "Chandler's Wobble". I had almost forgotten Mr Chandler until I came across this site. Did I mention that he used to tell us small children that one day the ice caps would melt, the world would shift on its axis, and the ocean would come right up to his shop so that sailors could tie up out the front while they bought shackles?

I can't find the mention of Mr Chandler and his wobble any more, but things change after 20 years. Still loony.

Pax Americana Equals Pax Romana!!
Bing Crosby won hearts and minds with his portrayal of Father O'Malley, the archetypal dedicated parish priest. Priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan helped create the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope and within a few months inspired the movement that led to the collapse of communism. Singers Sister Janet Mead and Soeur Sourire had us bopping to The Lord's Prayer and Dominique respectively. All smokescreens. All just attempts to hide from us the awful truth that Rome was running the USA by appointing presidents and everyone else that mattered. And what about those Catholic German Samaritan Jews, the Warburgs?

John Taylor Gatto - Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling
Schools and teachers feature strongly in popular culture. There are the dedicated teachers in films like To Sir With Love and Goodbye, Mr Chips, the imparting of truth and wisdom seen in the Harry Potter books and Dead Poets Society, and who could forget the values of education so poignantly displayed in Blackboard Jungle and The Belles of St Trinians? Now we find that all this is deception. Schools are just there to brainwash children, to make them pawns in some master plan to supply industry with slave labour and mindless consumers. The thing that amazed me most was that schools were only invented in the 20th century. It's just as well that Henry VI is dead, or he would be wondering what he had been doing in 1440 starting a school at Eton.

Sadly John Taylor Gatto passed in 2018. That's not "passed" as in successfully completing a school assignment, because even a suggestion that schools could measure anything was anathema to JTG.

The World Cup Conspiracy
The Coliseum in Rome was built to control the populace by giving them bread and circuses so that they wouldn't notice the corruption, nepotism and all-round badness of the world rulers of the time. A couple of millenniums later, not much has changed except that now the world rulers can inject their subjects with tiny robots before letting them into the stadiums and arenas where the circuses are held. Millions of people, nay, billions are forced to watch on television as men with only one name and men with strange hair run around giant antennas in some Asian place for hours until the viewers' minds are so numb that they will accept that the fate of nations can be decided by a "golden goal" and that the person making that "goal" should be paid vast amounts of money for scoring a single point in what some call a sporting contest but which other people call "soccer". Stronger evidence for mass mind control would be hard to find.

Australian Gravitational Space Propulsion Research Innovations
I like a good invention, especially if it overturns the orthodoxy of hide-bound science and exploits the secret knowledge of how the universe really works when it is not hiding reality from us and pretending that there are rules. Rules made by men can be broken by men. It is an amazing breakthrough to discover that rotational motion can be converted into linear motion. Oh, yes, we all know about pistons that go up and down and how that up and down gets turned into round and round by a crank, but it takes a true genius thinking outside the cylinder to go the other way and turn round and round into up and down. Or in and out, for that matter.

A haggish fraud lawyers up (10/2/2007)
Or should that be "A fraudulent hag lawyers up?" One of the worlds most blatant non-psychics, Sylvia Browne™, has decided that she doesn't like criticism of her and her work and has threatened legal action against a web site called StopSylviaBrowne.com. [Update 9/5/2009: Robert Lancaster, who created the StopSylviaBrowne web site suffered a serious illness and missed the deadline for renewing the domain name. Either Browne or one of the fraudster's sycophants grabbed the name and used it to promote Browne. I have corrected the link so that it points to where it should. PB 9 May 2009 A link check in early 2019 went to something totally irrelevant.]  In the true spirit of people who either can't or won't respond to criticism by presenting facts, Sylvia Browne™ has not sued for defamation but has claimed that the site owner is damaging the trademark "Sylvia Browne". This strategy can be used to initiate and maintain a lengthy and expensive court case where lawyers argue about the finer points of commercial and intellectual property law while avoiding any discussion of freedom of speech until the respondent either goes broke or gives up. I have had some experience with this. (I should point out that my use of the term "intellectual property" should in no way be taken to imply that there is anything about Sylvia Browne™ that is in any way related to the every-day use of the word "intellectual".)

Here are some facts. Sylvia Browne™ has no power to see the future or to detect anything by any form of supernatural or paranormal power. She is a stage performer who pretends to be really doing things that many other stage performers will admit are tricks of the trade. She could be seen as a harmless buffoon if she didn't charge very large sums of money to deceive and disappoint people who are influenced by the credibility given to her by uncritical television programs. The most recent in a long series of Sylvia Browne™ gaffes was to tell the parents of a missing boy that their son was dead and then offer to locate his body (for a suitable fee, of course). The boy was alive and has been returned to his parents, but has The Trademark apologised? Of course not. I have children of my own and I can imagine what these parents went through not knowing what had happened to their son. I can equally imagine how they must feel now that they know that they were lied to and had their hopes almost destroyed by a charlatan who only saw them as an unopened pay packet.

On a lighter note, I was intrigued by the logo used by The Trademark's law firm (who managed to misspell their client's name at one point, a sure sign of competence in a business where cases can be decided on ambiguities in punctuation). It looks very much as if the logo includes a representation of a goose. (Note to lawyers – the logo is reproduced here for the purpose of fair comment and any suggestions that its appearance here dilutes or damages its commercial value will be met with incredulity and several more entries in the Google index for the words "idiotic" and "risible".)

Under the headword "goose" in my copy of the Macquarie Dictionary it gives as one of the definitions "a silly or foolish person; simpleton". The word can also be used as a verb, and here the dictionary says "to poke someone between the buttocks". Perhaps this could be taken as a suggestion for what Sylvia Browne™ and her lawyers should do with their ridiculous law suit.

See everything that appeared in 2007 here.

Child abuser dies. Nobody cries. (24/12/2014)
Speaking of other aspects of the quackery industry, the good news continued the next day. One of the most disgusting charlatans around, Dr Mayer Eisenstein, had died. According to the report on one anti-vaccination liar web site "he was rushed to the ED and died peacefully in his sleep". Even in death, his followers had to lie about him, because being rushed to hospital is not compatible with peaceful dying while sleeping. The conspiracy theorists were immediately on the case, asking why a very healthy man who knew all the right supplements to take should die at any age:

(I assume the "MCG" was an autocorrect of "MUCH". The writer probably lives in Melbourne
and her Facebook client thought she meant "Melbourne Cricket Ground". As you do.)

And why would anti-vaccination liars be such fans of this creature? Because he was apparently the person who first thought of administering Lupron to autistic children. This drug is used for the chemical castration of sex offenders and this man thought that it was appropriate to give it to prepubescent children for no scientific reason, but certainly for the financial reason of stealing parents' life savings at a cost of several thousand dollars per month. I assume that, like the Geiers, he was submitting false insurance claims, because Lupron is not approved for the treatment of anything other than precocious puberty.

People often say that you should only say good things about the dead. Mayer Eisenstein is dead, and that is a good thing to say. Unfortunately his family is already talking about how to continue the business. We are supposed to feel sorry for his family but they knew full well what he was doing and they were happy to spend the money he stole from parents and insurance companies.

See everything that appeared in 2014 here.