Updates made to The Millenium Project in February 2021
Part 1

It's February already, and time to reflect on some good news (6/2/2021)
A post from a year ago that bears repeating.

Censorship!!! Cry me a river. (6/2/2021)
The latest newsletter from the Australian Vaccination-[bullshit and lies] Network contains a plea to watch a video that is being censored and banned everywhere. Watch it before it's too late. Oh, and don't forget to watch it in a manner which makes money for the AV-[b&l]N. Or you can watch the excrescence here and not have to pay anyone anything. It's free and cheap at half the price.

I really like the way that a lawyer (indicated by the "Esq" postnominal) is a "General Council". The rest of the world would probably say "General Counsel", but I have often pointed out that any publication from anti-vaccination liars must contain at least one inaccuracy just in case the number of lies doesn't get to the quota required.

See more from Tom Gauld here

Speaking of data … (6/2/2021)
I admit it might sound oxymoronic to talk about quacks having principles, but that is for just one meaning of the word. One of the fundamental principles, an axiom actually, is that real doctors (hereinafter referred to as "doctors") only treat symptoms and not the underlying causes of diseases. 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.

Quacks don't like being reminded of the first two paragraphs in Samuel Hahnemann's The Organon of Medical Arts. For those who came in late, Hahnemann invented homeopathy.

So homeopaths are expressly forbidden from treating anything except symptoms. Allopaths (which again according to Hahnemann, the inventor of the word, means everyone except homeopaths, so includes chiropractors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, etc) can waste their time looking for causes, not just effects.

Let's look at the ten most prescribed medications in Australia in the twelve months from July 2019 to June 2020.

Of the ten, only four (numbers 3,4,7 and 8) treat conditions which can have obvious symptoms. (Salbutamol in the form of Ventolin is actually available without prescription, but the pharmacist will ask questions.) The rest treat things which can only be detected by testing. Oh, and speaking of the dreadful side effects of Big Pharma drugs, I was prescribed one of the ten but suffered a side effect. It was annoying more than it was dangerous, the effect is well known and my doctor simply changed me to something else.

Another axiom is that doctors only prescribe medications to make pharmaceutical companies rich, but you will notice that all ten of the most prescribed drugs in the country are out of patent and can be made by anyone with the necessary quality control.

It's true that holding a current patent can allow a manufacturer to make a lot of money, so let's look at the drugs which cost the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme the most money over the period.

Surely if doctors were trying to maximise Big Pharma income they would be prescribing these drugs, but even the most often prescribed one in this list, Apixaban, isn't in the top ten by numbers (its also the least expensive per dose). And remember how doctors don't have a clue about treating cancer - a look at the top three suggests that a lot of money is being spent in the pursuit of making life easier for patients with various forms of cancer. Also, with the exceptions of psoriasis and arthritis, most of the conditions have to be quite well advanced before any symptoms become evident. I have a check for macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy every year but it requires an optometrist to use special equipment to detect any early signs, and I know someone whose osteoporosis was only detected when looking for the cause of something else (and that something else was detected by x-ray when looking for something else again – no symptoms at all).

The full report from the PBS can be found here.

See more from SMBC here

Plus les choses changent, plus elles ne devraient pas (13/2/2021)
In a slight modification of Ambrose Karr's famous saying, the French above means "The more things change the more they should not". When I did this month's regular check for broken and changed links on this site I discovered that two places to which I had lots of links have simply disappeared.

I've made good use of the Therapeutic Goods Administration's Complaints Resolution Panel to illustrate action taken against quacks and other people who make outrageous medical claims. The TGA have completely closed the CRP web site – no archive of articles, nothing except

I assume that the relevant information has been subsumed into the main TGA site, but I will have to do an individual search for each link to see if the information still exists. Or I could dive around in the Internet Archive.

Of course there is always the possibility that someone at the TGA forgot to pay a renewal fee for something. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Or, put more crudely, is it a conspiracy or a cockup?

The other site causing grief is Yahoo!. I have lots of links to messages posted to the enormous number of mailing lists at Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo! have decided to get out of the mailing list business and now all links to any of the groups or their contents are redirected to the main Yahoo! front page. No archive, no "We are mothballing Groups and no more messages will be accepted". Nothing.

So for all of next week I'll be tracking down where the links used to go to to try to salvage something. I might be retired but I have better things to do with my time.

Not all the news from the link check was bad, however. I was alerted to a change in the site belonging to Australia's outpost of the Qanon insanity movement. The site now just says that they have closed down in Australia and won't be coming back. Apparently they became extremely offended at recognition of Islam as a religion and now think that the country is a lost cause in the fight against everything because antifa has won over bigotry. As the saying goes: "Door! Arse! Way out!". [Update: When I did my monthly link check in March 2021 it showed that the Q web site had vanished completely. The good news continues.]

It's that time of the year again (13/2/2021)
It's time for the annual Gates Letter from Bill and Melinda Gates. This year the topic is "The year global health went local" and as usual it's a well written, well thought out piece of work. Highly recommended, even if only to annoy the lunatics who blame Bill for everything that goes wrong in the world.

Click here to read the letter

Brush With Fame Time: I once stood next to Bill at a computer show. He was only a little more famous and rich than I was at the time. He is now a little bit more famous and a little bit richer. But I don't mind.

See more Bizarro comics here

Grumble, grumble, where the time goes. (13/2/2021)
When this site came back from its sabbatical in March 2019 I started using Patreon to gather donations. Since then I have received several emails from Patreon advising me of visitors who have committed to monthly donations. I have received exactly $0.00 (zero dollars and zero cents) from Patreon in the two years. I don't know where any of this money went but I know where it didn't go, and I apologise to anyone who has been trying to send me money. I didn't get any of it.

I recently saw someone talking about what a good thing Patreon is so I mentioned the memory hole absorbing money supposedly coming my way and she told me that I was doing things wrong. Apparently I have to have a web site under Patreon's domain name and not just have my own site with links. (She referred to her site as "my Patreon".) When I sold stuff from my business web site I didn't have to have a page at PayPal to get paid; Amazon are happy (well, not too happy) to pay me for book sales from this site without making me operate under an Amazon domain name; I've had other affiliate programs in the past which worked the same way.

As of today, all Patreon links have been removed from all the pages in this site. I see no reason to promote their service in any way if it doesn't do what I need doing.

And that's another time waster this week and why there's not much else here. Hopefully normal transmission can be resumed shortly.