Newsflash: Hundreds of people overdosed on homeopathy treatments at the weekend and nobody died. Some may have been a little giddy with the extra sugar.
It wasn’t a bad stunt, one that got a little bit of coverage in the press. The homeopathy cronies will easily explain the reason that overdoses don’t kill or harm to be due to the safe nature of homeopathy treatment so no real harm is caused to their stories of voodoo and beating glass on leather.
Here’s the thing though: homeopathy does work as a pretty good placebo and the placebo effect is well documented to help people recover from all sorts of unlikely ailments. If thick people want to buy a placebo then it’s got to be cheaper for the NHS than paying for lots of expensive drugs. If it works then the NHS saves money, if it doesn’t then it’s not like we’ve lost an Einstein, is it?
I think everyone should read how it is actually supposed to work, it’s like someone made it up to see just how gullible people would actually be (eaten any spiders in your sleep recently?). Basically you get something that’s bad for you and then watering it down so much that there is none left. An example would be using caffeine to cure insomnia, but then watering it down so much that you would need a tub of water bigger than the known universe to find just a single caffeine molecule. The best bit is that by hitting the flask of water or shaking it makes the water remember what was in it.
I didn’t make that up. Samuel Hahnemann did in 1796 and people still fall for it.
I am now regularly hitting the side of my toilet bowl after I do a big turd so that the water I use to flush it will remember the poo. It’ll also be plenty diluted so extra potent by the time the homeopathy fans drink my shit.
BBC have a nice article about online giving which mentions the very wonderful Justgiving. They go at lengths to explain that although companies like Justgiving charge for their payment processing services they actually save charities money by consolidating the payment processing and doing it cheaper than the charities could do it themselves. If you give your money direct to a charity you aren’t giving it to an organisation entirely staffed by volunteers, it still costs money to employ them to process your donation. Even so, one bright spark has commented thus:
It’s good to finally see a big not-for-profit player in this market. Regardless of how well the charities have done out of the existence of JustGiving & co, it always grates when making charitable donations to be handing a cut to a for-profit business.
Peyman, London
Dude, words fail me. Even if you ring up a charity direct you are going to be costing them:
- A portion of the cost of the donation phone line
- A portion of the wages of the person writing down your bank details and punching it into a machine
- The payment processing costs which are paid to the card companies
- A portion of the wages of the person who posts off the information to HMRC to claim the gift aid
- A portion of the wages of the accounts people who keep track of it all and auditors who make sure it’s legit
- If you donate via the charity’s website you’re looking at server and maintenance costs as well as hosting and bandwidth, plus most of the above
For a small charity that’s just not practical and those that attempt it themselves can expect to end up spending more than if they got Justgiving to do it for them.
It’s a little quiet on the news front today. Well, it is in some papers. It’s mainly quiet in the scaremonger press because the big news story of the day is something they don’t want to shout about. So this one’s for all the parents who still think that the MMR jab is linked to autism: 
Yes, you lot. People who say stuff like:
‘I feel the children are being used as political pawns – it has not been about protecting the children. It is about protecting MMR.
‘I firmly believe these doctors are going to be hung out to dry because they dared to question MMR.
‘Dr Wakefield and his colleagues are the only doctors who ever really listened to us. I fear now that no doctor will want to have anything to do with helping any child that is harmed by any vaccine in the future.’
She said that after Michael had the MMR jab when he was 14 months old he began ’screaming and making a high pitch screeching like a cat’.
She added: ‘He was like a wild animal he was in so much pain.’
Shut the fuck up already.
The Supreme Leader plans to stop direct flights from Yemen to the UK. That’ll stop ‘em.
Trouble is, banning direct flights only really works if there are only two countries in existence.
This story is a pretty funny example of how retarded a few coppers can be if they have nothing better to do.
