As I have said here before, I used to think Tony Abbott was the worst liar I hd ever seen in federal parliament1, 2, but he pales into insignificance compared to the appalling liar that is Scott Morrison3, 4. The recent backflip with regard to electric vehicles has once again exposed this despicable lying so clearly that nobody but his most ardent apologists (and there are a few even outside the Murdoch zoo) will be able to excuse it.
In 2018, an estimated 570,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer worldwide, and about 311,000 women died from the disease. Almost all cervical cancer cases (99%) are linked to infection with high-risk human papillomaviruses, an extremely common series of viruses transmitted through sexual contact1. The vaccine for these papillomaviruses was initially developed at the University of Queensland2.
Many years ago, I was talking to a friend who had been at a dinner party of some sort, at which a professional economist was present. He got into conversation with this bloke and the topic eventually came around to whaling and what it was doing to world whale populations. This topic was in the news at the time, either because Australia had done something to protect whales or because Japan or some other country was pretending their whaling had something to do with science.
Recidivist ‘ruperter’, Sophie Elsworth is the national personal finance writer and columnist for News Corp. She has been whining about the Victorian government’s handling of its Covid-19 outbreaks for well over a year1,2.
However, she never seems to complain about the federal government’s incompetence, which was manifest even before the pandemic arrived on our shores and has continued subsequently3.
In an impromptu interview with Australian reporters at the G20 in Rome, French President Emmanuel Macron was asked if he thought Morrison had lied to him over the cancellation of a submarine contract in September. The French President’s reply was damning. He said: “I don’t think, I know.”1
Anti-vaxxers (anti-vaccination activists) will often try to tell you that the Covid-19 vaccine has killed thousands of people. In the most recent case, an antivaxxer tried to tell me that over 9,000 people in the US have died after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine and the truth (?) can be found in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The antivaxxers tend not to specify which vaccine nor any other details.
We need to start off with a bit of geology for this article, before we move into chemistry. The Permian Period is an interval of geological time which began 298.9 million years ago and ended 251.9 million years ago, so it lasted 47 million years1.
Everyone who reads articles in the blog will know that I have a particularly low opinion of Scott Morrison’s character1-3, as Emmanuel Macron also seems to do4.