I'm dancing on the grave of Meryl Dorey's charitable status

Huzzah! Meryl Dorey, whose Australian (anti-)Vaccination Network has been in deep trouble for, oops, not registering as a charity while collecting donations, keeping their funds in inappropriately sized boxes, which somehow led to vast wads of cash vanishing, and stealing intellectual property, has had her charitable status revoked!

Woohoo! Here's a copy of the revocation, which I shall read out in the children's intensive care ward every year at Christmas:

The best part of the email she sent out was at the bottom, a standard statement that's at the bottom of all of her emails:

About Australian Vaccination Network, Inc.

The AVN is a non-profit, volunteer-run charitable association. Since 1994, the AVN has provided information and support to the general community who are trying to make informed choices about vaccination and health. Their lobbying in Federal Parliament has ensured that compulsory vaccination for children has not come to pass and they are the major reporters of vaccine adverse reactions to ADRAC (The Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee).

Gonna have to change that first sentence, Meryl! Hahaha!

HJ

HJHOP Movie Review: Disaster movie overload

Hey, y'all. Bing here. Not totally back from my blog vacation, but I have had some extra time tonight and wanted to get a little personal writing in. I've officially started the job hunt, sending off my first application of the season to my alma mater, which really needs me back. Also, I was able to get an article off to a teaching journal. When it arrived, the editor was online and she wrote back that my style was original and refreshing, or something. Like I've always said, nobody can resist the word "pigfucker."

Anyway, it's been a fairly productive month for me. I've gotten a couple of large projects off of the ground, am looking to publish under my real name (for once), and am generally having a pretty good go right now. My big plan this weekend was to go to my place of employment, plug my guitar into my amp, turn the amp up to eleven, and rock Atlanta retarded. I was ready to go. I was going to set up on a fourth-story balcony overlooking a courtyard at my building, but on Saturday, the day before Bingfest 2010 (3 hours of sex, drugs and calculus), I scoped out where I should unload the 150lbs of gear I intended to bring. The sidewalks near all easy access points to the building were closed. I had a swear and stomped my little foot. I figured that with the car I was going to use, I would need at least 3 people to move all this stuff in. Grr. One day, people.

In the meantime, I have been watching disaster movies. Specifically, 2012 disaster movies. The three that I watched yesterday and the day before were:

2012

2012: Doomsday

2012: Supernova

These are listed in no particular order of badness. Each one of these was a cinematic abortion.

First was 2012: Doomsday. The Earth is "aligned" with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy and the interior of the earth is heating up, or something. The movie opens at the base of a volcano, which disappointingly does not kill all of the main characters. At an archaeological dig in Mexico, and the chief digger, Albino McHonkeypants finds a crucifix at a Mayan site and decides that Mayan culture was actually white European culture. Thanks, white master, and happy Christopher Columbus Day! This links Christianity and the New World in a way almost as goofy as Mormonism. At any rate, this $12 Catholic supply crucifix needs to be delivered to another temple for some reason or another. A Mexican woman, who might be having a baby without knowing man in either the Biblical or Mayan sense, needs to give birth on an altar at the same temple, for some reason. And...then there is an atheist whose irritating mother needs to be fucking raptured already. They are all converging on this temple...for some reason. In this movie god kills a lot of secondary characters in some pretty low-budget ways. First, the wife of the archaeologist dies of a little ouchy on her back. An irritating photojournalist who is clearly trying to get into the pants of a chipmunk-faced missionary is, I shit you not, impaled by hail.

The script was clearly written NASA climatologists ("The temperature is going to reach minus 20 degrees...below zero!"), or possibly heavily sedated monkeys. It stars nobody and had a production budget of 12 pesos. Cinematically, it is like having your eyes removed, fucked, and put back into your head. The extra features were my favorite bit, where you learn about what a low-rent job it was. Something that stuck out at the beginning was the endless helicopter shots up a river that had nothing to do with...anything in the movie. It turns out, the people with the cameras were given a free helicopter ride and had an assload of footage. As far as I can tell, this is the movie equivalent of forcing someone to watch your fucking home movies.

The comments to the trailer (below) are precious. It's not the worst movie ever, however. Just really, really, really, really bad.

The woman screaming "What's happening?!?" represents the movie-goer, except that this woman apparently cares.

Next was 2012, last year's mega blockbuster. Big special effects do not a good movie make. OK, in this nightmare scenario, the sun is giving off neutrinos that have "mutated" (I shit you not) and are now microwaving the interior of the planet. Basically, the crust of the earth is going to slide around and all sorts of shit's gonna happen, floods reaching the summit of Mt. Everest, supervolcanoes and Woody Harrelson getting yet another job as a whacked out whacko. Danny Glover is the President of the United States (Morgan Freeman was apparently unavailable), but he is struck and killed by an aircraft carrier, so the Undersecretary of Water Management takes over. Here's the entire plot summary: John Cusack, in variously sized planes, barely escapes as runways collapse behind him. Fuck.

And, just as in real life, in 2012 nobody pays any attention to Africa the entire time.

Last was le turd de resistance, 2012: Supernova. This was actually produced by the same company that released 2012: Doomsday. In this movie, I have no idea what the fuck happens. Apparently there's a supernova that they detected before the blast got here (ahem) and so there is a precise countdown to the moment when the supernova blast is going to fuck up the earth in no uncertain terms. There's an unlikable character who is...I have no clue what he is supposed to be. An astronaut? A soldier? Director of Mission Control? If Gene Kranz ever sees this, he's gonna be sick all over vest. Either that or declare, "Failure is desirable."

So the main character, whoever the fuck he is, needs to get to a base for some reason, but on the way there he is attacked by Iranians wearing Palestinian garb. (Ouch.) I think that he knows that it is the end of the world, because he takes his family with him, but then he sends them back and they get lost in the desert, much like the viewer. The wife(?) and daughter(?), who are somehow not related, get chased by lightning, tornadoes, and creepy California rednecks.

How is our hero(?) going to save the world? Fire nukes in the general direction of the blast so that they make some sort of force field. I don't know. I started bleeding from the eyes at this point. I was pleased to hear in the extra features that the "star" of the picture did not have a stunt double, so he got smacked around a lot.

Oh, during earthquakes, when everyone is lurching around like on the bridge of the Enterprise, someone forgot to move the camera. It's. So. Bad. I should also mention that NASA, in this movie at least, launches shuttles from the middle of Joshua Tree National Forest, and that they can "rig" shuttles so they can be launched manually.

With beautiful establishing shots filmed as someone drove past NASA, this movie is a testimony to how little can be accomplished without a budget. In true Space Mutiny style, space stations are clearly set in industrial warehouses, the evil foreign characters have rotten accents, and in the least surprising twist in the history of things resembling cinema, the bad guy is the Chinese woman. OH FUCK, I should have said spoiler alert. Oh, well. Can't be helped.

Anyway, I demand an apology from everyone who participated in the making of these movies. You are to movie making what I am to yodeling. Please burn down your own studios to prevent another disastrous round of disaster flicks.

HJ

There's a cow at the end of this video...

HJ

Is there a cure for god?

Busy. So insanely busy. Trying to remember what the principle of making sure that there is even being a mystery to investigate is called. Crap.

Meanwhile, however, as I tried to jog my memory on the Intertoobies, I came across this. Benefit from my ignorance:

The first 3 are "no." The fourth is "depends."

Back to work.

HJ

We have a blurry image of the culprit...

We better enhance it:

HJ (who was cracked up by this one rather a whole lot)

I'm trying to figure out exactly how much I should hate this article

So, here's the deal. I'm still on bloggy vacation, but I finished what work I set out to do today, so I am going to chill with a blog post.

The piece I'm talking about tonight perfectly confounding piece is aggravating because it mixes sense with unfettered, unqualified horse leavings. It's called "Left Hates Science and Children," it's by a guy I never heard of, Dan Gainor, and it dots the pasture at townhall.com.

One one hand, he mentions something that is important: vaccines work. Not enough people are publicizing this important fact of public health. We need to make sure that the national immune system is strong, and that can only be achieved through an aggressive vaccination program with high levels of compliance. Hell yeah, Dan. Totally on board.

Everything else that you say is fertilizer, which itself has been packed into a truck and detonated out in front of the bullshit factory.

Let me use a quote to summarize his argument:

The anti-vaccine freak-out has been driven like so many other issues in our society – by big name, liberal standbys like [Robert] Kennedy [Jr.], Hollywood celebs like former Playboy model and TV personality Jenny McCarthy, whose son has autism, and a compliant media that gives deference to liberal kooks as long as they bash conservatives.

He mentions two people in the entire article pushing antivax bullshit, two people who are impervious to reason, and in the case of McCarthy, has a possibly pathological personality (if her strange book Louder Than Words is accurate). His entire argument depends on that hanging together. I have no knowledge about whether or not McCarthy is a conservative or liberal, though I sense she is almost perfectly self-absorbed: unless it satisfies her fucked-up mom-crush on her son, she is simply uninterested.

Do these two people even hate "science"? I don't think that you can even say that. I think that science is irrelevant to McCarthy, and the worst I can say about Kennedy (well, I could say worse) is that he is dramatically misinformed about one aspect of public health, has repeatedly shown himself to be unteachable, and is in no way an expert about anything medicine-related. (Gainor neglects to mention that every point that would have been substantive in the Rolling Stone article by Kennedy that Gainor refers to was subsequently corrected in subsequent issues of the magazine by the editors, utterly negating any pretense that the article may have had to utility. Funny how the baby-eating liberals did that, eh?)

He is, ironically, exactly as factually wrong about autism as is Jenny McCarthy when he reports that McCarthy's son "has autism" (silly person, didn't you hear that he was cured by eating gluten free....everything?). McCarthy's son never had autism, and we know this because 1) he is supposedly much better now and 2) you don't get cured of autism. This makes her whole crusade even more bizarre. Gainor plays the same "What about the children?" card in his title just as McCarthy does every time she opens her cocksucker. Gainor dismisses climate change over the overwhelming agreement climate scientists, apparently because it is associated with Al Gore ("Gorean," he calls it), in just the same way Jenny McCarthy dismisses the perfect consensus of every scholar and practitioner of public health because she noticed that vaccines are associated with drug companies.

As a final irony, he is concerned about the perception of a conservative war on science. :)

HJ

Rick Sanchez Fired, Jew Still Employed--LMAO

I shit you not, I was at the back of a public radio event that Rick "Filthy" Sanchez was at and even from literally the seat farthest away from him in that massive concert hall, I was still overwhelmed by the odor of donkey scrotum. Seriously, I heard him for about 5 minutes, and it was over. This guy is an unpleasant, thoughtless, boorish ogre. And I wanted to see him tazed, over and over for hours.

Then I wrote about it. An HJHOP Flashback (does not count as going off of bloggy vacation).

It's like I'm a psychic. Or that he is an outstandingly bad person.

HJ

Update: Oh, he's also a vapid man-ditz. Not in a small way. Seriously, look at these links and never stop laughing. See? and Here and here and here and here. (Links from the Randi forum. And now Randi has fucked up my fonts.)