Anti-Vaxxers need to shut the fuck up

I haven’t really unloaded on anti-vaxxers but I think they’re about due. An American anti-vaxxer called Dr Sherri Tenpenny is being set up to tour Australia and some people are saying she should be denied an entry visa. Presumably because she’s promoting an agenda that kills children.

Because at the end of the day, that’s what these anti-vaccination fuckwits are doing – killing children. It’s only a matter of time until there’s a major outbreak of preventable disease caused by these idiots. I wouldn’t join a campaign to block any of them entering the country as I think it’s a free speech issue. But I do think they should be publicly vilified for their disgusting lies.

They shouldn’t be able to open their idiot mouths publicly without someone else countering their ridiculous fairy stories with the actual truth. The seminars Tenpenny plans to present are being touted as helping parents “make some crucial decisions which could determine your child’s future health and wellbeing”. Which is pretty much true.

Because if you follow what these fuckwits say you may well be killing your children.

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Cannabis Cures Cancer? Stop being so stupid!

 

There’s an increasing number of people online pushing the idea that cannabis cures cancer. There isn’t one type of person who promotes the positive aspects of cannabis, they range from people who say smoking or ingesting cannabis helps offset the nausea caused by chemo, that it helps boost appetite in chemo patients, that it boosts the effectiveness of medical treatments, through to people who say cannabis alone is a complete cancer treatment on its own and extreme cases who say medical authorities know cannabis is a cure but there is a conspiracy to suppress “the truth”.

 

To address people who are on that extreme end of the spectrum: stop being so stupid! Conspiracy theories generally are stupid but this one includes a huge amount of offensiveness as well. It’s all well and good to point out “big pharma” is focused on profits but to suggest the millions of researchers around the world would deliberately suppress something that would cure cancer is simply disgusting. Only the worst, most self-indulgent and self-obsessed  sort of vermin would say this. To these people I’d go further than saying stop being so stupid – stop hiding behind your narcissism and paranoia while you attack people who are actually dedicating their lives to helping others. Better still, stop breathing. You’re a waste of nutrients.

 

A few key facts worth bearing in mind when discussing this: First there is no one thing that is “cancer”. When we talk about people having cancer and potential treatments and cures, we’re talking about a huge range of diseases that manifest in very different ways. There will never be a single cure for all cancers but hopefully we’ll continue to develop better treatments and even cures for particular types of cancer. Second, what research has actually shown is that cannabis and synthetic cannbinoids have the potential to help with cancer. This may ultimately come to nothing, they may form part of improved treatment or we may end up finding ways to successfully treat some cancers with cannabinoids alone.

 

But the reason cannabis is not being used to treat cancer now is there is no conclusive (or even reasonable) evidence it works. Research is ongoing because researchers have discovered many interesting properties of cannabinoids over the decades but we haven’t seen anywhere near enough clinical trials to draw any meaningful conclusions. Personally, I think large scale clinical trial of cannabinoids being conducted sooner rather than later is a good idea. The trouble is, politics come into it very quickly (drugs are bad, mkay?). I think that’s phenomenally stupid but it is reality. This politics affects far more than medicinal cannabis, there’s also a promising body of evidence that hallucinogens could be very useful in treating a range of mental illnesses but it’s very difficult to do clinical trials legally.

 

And I’d just like to deflate the ridiculous “Big Pharma” conspiracy. If you’re one of the people pushing this as the reason cannabis isn’t being recognised as a cure for cancer (“it’s natural and they can’t patent it so they suppress the truth”) stop being so stupid. If we ever have enough evidence to use cannabis as a cure for cancer you won’t be smoking or ingesting it – not in the form you do now. That’s an unreliable dosage system and it has all the “against the law” baggage. Big Pharma is spending a fortune on research in this area because any effective treatment  that gets endorsed by government will be a synthetic cannabinoid which can be patented and/or controlled by big companies because they’ll do some tweak to the chemical makeup of the cannabinoid in a lab and say it’s unique. 

 

Big Pharma isn’t trying to suppress any discovery of the effectiveness of cannabis as a cancer treatment – they want to exploit it. Saying they’re concealing “the truth” makes you look like a paranoid idiot. I wonder what causes that paranoia? And using the inane argument “natural is better” makes no sense. Stop being so stupid. Cowpats are natural. I’d like to force feed you a few of them and see if you continued to argue that everything natural was good.

 

So in short, cannabis helps some people with some of the symptoms of cancer and chemo treatments. For other people it has no effect and for some it has a negative effect. People are different and the same substance can affect them differently. Advanced research has shown cannabinoids having some interesting effects on cancer cells and they may be the source of good news in the future. But there’s no solid evidence yet that cannabis cures cancer. There’s no conspiracy to suppress the truth about this. Anecdotes from charlatans selling snake oil (or hemp oil in this case) are not evidence in any meaningful sense of the world. Everyone would like for there to be a cure for cancer but spreading this unmitigated bull just makes you look stupid.

 

For a very thorough overview of the evidence so far follow this link.

 

How to tell someone you don’t give a fuck

It seems I have to spend an inordinate amount of time telling people online that I don’t give a fuck about their worthless dribbling. So I’m trying to come up with creative ways to tell them. Sure, I love the simplicity of “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” but I also like variety.

So far I’ve come up with:

• I’ve checked my “things to do” list. Your mum is right at the top but giving a fuck about you just isn’t there
• NASA sent a deep space probe to the planet Giveafuckaboutyou and confirmed that I wasn’t there
• Your web search “times I give a fuck about you” returned no results. Did you mean “times I don’t give a fuck about you?”
• 404 File not found. You apparently thought you’d find me giving a fuck about you. You were wrong. You could try the following – Find someone else who gives a fuck about you; grow the fuck up; just fuck off
• Today’s lesson is titled “I don’t give a fuck about you”. Tomorrow’s lesson is the same as today’s
• Wanting you to fuck off and giving a fuck about you are not the same thing. So fuck off

And for those who like visual aids, I produced this Venn diagram on GraphJam:

Venn Diagram

 

Feel free to make your own contributions 🙂

Should your website have a flash intro?

When Flash first landed on the World Wide Web (we still called it that back in those days) it was very popular and it became common for websites that wanted to look “cool” to load a Flash animation when a visitor arrived at the site. The standard method was to force the user to sit through this animation to convince them of how cool you were.

As time passed it became widely accepted that this practice was, to use the technical term, totally fucked. Despite years of frustrated users screaming at the websites to get that stupid fucking intro out of their way and let them use the site, some sites argue that there are certain cases where a Flash into is still a good idea.

Maybe so. I’m a helpful guy. Really. So I’ve provided this handy flow chart for all web designers and marketing people to consult before they put a Flash intro in place. Use this and no matter what your product, no matter who your target audience, you will always reach the right decision:

Thanks to everyone for the overwhelmingly positive response to this post. I fixed the appalling typos that were in the first paragraph after they were pointed out to me.  Interestingly (to me at least) this post has also been translated into Italian: http://www.wafer.it/main/index.php?id_pag=52&id_blog_post=48

God’s to-do list

Found stuck to a very large fridge somehwre in the cosmos:

For those who can’t tell, I spent a lot of time in Catholic school.

Reasons I rip on haters

People often ask me, if I think haters are such a waste of space, why do I take the time to rip on them?  I punch those people in the face.  I have a range of reasons for ripping on haters and they are neatly explained in this graph:

haters chart

Colourful AND informative!

I’m Still Angry at Hippies

Q1: What's worse that hippies prattling on about "spiritual healing"?

A1: People who form cults built around hippie spiritual healing concepts.

Q2: What's worse than silly new age cults?

A2: Silly new age cults that charge money for "energy conversion sessions"

Q3: What's worse than religious/hippie cults ripping people off via bogus new age crap?

A3: Cult leaders who sexually assault little girls.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/girls-molested-during-sessions/2006/05/25/1148524807764.html

Guess what happens to child molesters in jail dickhead? Get ready for some "enlightenment" you really aren't going to like.

Smack the qi Right Outta These Hippies

The mob has spoken – it's fun to rip on hippies! Today we will examine how a hippie is capable of stringing together a bunch of perfectly good english words while still making no fucking sense whatsoever!

The following all comes under the heading "Tips to nurture your qi while working in the modern world." Oh yeah, qi is apparently life energy. I think some people spell it chi. So the hippies are appropriating chinese medicine here. I would like to say here that I'm not going to attempt to refute chinese medicine/herbalism/acupuncture. I just can't stand the appropriation of other cultures – especially when it seems the sole reason for doing so is so some pathetic whitey can seem deep and mystical to other dumb whiteys.

Qi is apparently at the source of chronic fatigue syndrome. Sounds terrible, but the hippies are here to help us. Step one is… wash your hands! That's right, get your qi all shipshape and bristol fashion by washing your hands. Hear that all you malingering chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers who feel like you can't even get out of bed some days.? It'll all come good if you wash your hands! Oh yeah, you have to have an "awareness on the level of qi" – makes all the difference.

Steps two on the road to hippie healing is… have a bath! But once more, with awareness of the level of qi. Without that, all you're doing is washing crap off your body. Oh, and on a really gross note, this hippie points out that they do "more than a simple excretion of toxic energies" in the bath. I am so not sharing bathwater with this person. And you thought you could relax in a bath without any hippie "wisdom"? Let me tell you, you aint thinkin' on the qi then you aint doin' shit.

And to really help us out, the hippie closes with "the most successful technique to combat the drain of mental and emotional stimulation" (okay, now I know what this hippie is doing in the bath). This technique involves "developing the centres of energy above the head". What, like in fucking helicopters? I really get angry with this tendency to spout meaningless drivel and cloak it in an air of "mystic knowledge". And don't ride on the coat-tails of other cultures, you're no different to the fucking conquistadors stealing gold when you try to steal someone else's spiritual beliefs.

On the plus side, I have discovered this magazine includes free passes to the hippies' Bullshitapalooza expo. I wasn't going to waste my money going, no matter how much fun it would be to rip on the hippies in person. Now I can get in free! Looks like Saturday April 29th is hippie head-kicking day.

What the *bleep* are these hippies on?

Don't worry dear readers, I'm not suddenly getting coy on the language front. Fuck no. Just echoing my target for today. It's a literary device – you see, I'm erudite as well as psychotically angry. Okay, time to focus.

I haven't attacked the hippies for a couple of days so I decided to read their propaganda rag again to get fired up. The article that caught my eye this time was titled "What the bleep are ice crystals?" which they take from the title of a recent movie: "What the bleep do we know?" The film basically talks to people about "scientific" theories. I put the word scientific in quotes because a lot in the movie doesn't really match the mainstream definition of science. Even the more orthodox stuff is on the fringes of science but a lot of the stuff they go on about is plain fucking stupid.

And, surprise, surprise, the hippies decide to go with one of the really fucking stupid concepts. Ice crystals. It sounds innocent enough but I don't have to read far before I want to find a hippie head to kick. You see, apparently "water refects consciousness" or, if you prefer, "like a blank CD, water records information". And they have photos that "prove" it. There certainly is a nice array of pictures if ice crystal. I'm not exactly sure how providing a series of images "proves" anything but it seems rational questioning is not the strong suit of these hippies.

I'm not even talking issues of photoshop manipulation here – they simply put up a series of photos and say this is an ice crystal that has been "exposed" to a particular word; love, hate, angel, devil, "do it"… I could put up a series of photos of plants in various states of health and say one was told "I love you", one was told "I hate you" and one was told "George Bush is actually quite intelligent and deserving of our admiration and in fact the citizens of the world have just voted him "Emperor of the world in perpetuity" (that one would have committed suicide).

Saying something doesn't make it so. And photographs don't prove a damn thing. Possibly the stupidest cliche in existence is "the camera doesn't lie". Cameras lie by definition – they produce a fake representation of a real thing. Somewhat like these hippies.

And in case you think I'm being too harsh on them, they go on to christen this phenomenon "hado" – Japanese word meaning vibration. That seems innocuous enough, but then they go straight on to say that hado "is fast becoming the new word for the 'force' popularised by the Jedi knights of Star Wars". Okaaaaay, you guys know Star Wars was science fiction right, not science? That's right, these moronic hippies bolster their claims by tying them to a fictional story.

What the fuck?

Oh, and their world expert on the topic is "Dr Emoto". Yes, their expert on emotional resonance is Dr Emoto and their expert on love has the surname "Love". Do they think they're being funny or are they deliberately insulting our intelligence?

I Can’t Make Up My Mind

That's right, today I'm angry because I can't make up my mind. I can't make up my mind which hippie most deserves a beating. I've been reading the promotional paper for the upcoming hippie "expo" again (I believe it's called something like "Fleece the desperate gullible fools for all they're worth" or was it "Bullshitapalooza '06"?)

Anyway, working my way through, I stumble across an article headed "Why you chose your partner". I'm perfectly happy to accept that a hippie might have some advice for a balanced relationship so I read on. There is a apparently a "hidden reason" you picked your partner. Doubtless the hippies is about to share their wisdom of what this reason is, so I read on. It seems it's all to do with wanting to meet needs that weren't met when we were growing up. That seems reasonable.

Then we get this piece of wisdom: "All children go through stages of development – for instance being babies". Riiiiight. So the wisdom to be gathered here is that we were all once babies. *Phew* Lucky I read this or I might never have known. The we get some quotes from an authority on love whose name is -I'm not making this up- Pat Love. Pat Love has written a book called "The Truth About Love". Is suspect that the truth about Pat Love is that s/he is a lying shitbag who preys on vulnerable people by spouting meaningless generalist rubbish and charging them a fortune for the privilege.

Then the big question: Is there one thing all couples need to know? The answer: people need to know what love is. Well, Foreigner told us that years ago. I think these hippies owe them royalties. Then we get to the meat of the matter – your partner isn't wrong, you are. "Being the right partner is more important than finding the right partner." And for me, here is the money quote:

"What does your partner ask you to do that you continually reject?"

So now it's clear. This whole article is born out of the fact that hippie's partner won't go along with a suggestion that doubtless involves latex masks and strap-on dildoes. Sick hippie freaks.