Vaccines "also cause stupidity"

Fear is sweeping the world once more, after a scientific trial has shown conclusive evidence that vaccines cause "extreme stupidity".

Saying that the study followed closely in the footsteps of the controversial MMR-Autism study of 2012, lead researcher for the Institute of Vaccination Studies, Charl Hatanrie explained that there was "an overwhelming link between being vaccinated and also being as stupid as fuck".

"If we look at the majority of hateful, bigoted commentators on the internet and also the vast majority of anti-vaccination conspiracy nuts who stand firmly by their anti-science, anti-logic and anti-reason ideals, we see that nearly 99% of these are vaccinated," he said. "Obviously there's a link between these two. That's how science works."

And a follow-up study of 12 "incredibly stupid" people has since confirmed parents' and scientists' worst fears.

"Looking at this hand-picked group of utterly thick 37-year-olds, we immediately see on their medical records that they've all been vaccinated against diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, Polio, whooping cough and many other diseases. In each and every one of these cases, they believe there to be a direct and unequivocal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. We can only deduce that vaccines made them as mind-bogglingly gormless as they so obviously are."

Scientists were originally hoping to find a vaccine against human imbecility, after a recent breakthrough brought us a vaccine against vaccine-caused-autism.

But now studies have since shown that "most morons alive today" - whether they believe evolution is a lie, that Santa Claus is real, or that the Earth lies at the center of the universe – are all similarly vaccinated.

"Scientists murp on about how vaccines have saved millions of lives across the planet – but there are millions of face-palmingly stupid people living right now and spreading their blithering idiocy on websites across the globe," said Hatanrie. "We are currently experiencing the largest international outbreak of stupidity since selfies were invented."

"How many fewer dumb fucks would be around today to cherry-pick unreviewed or outright discredited studies of the dangers of vaccines and thus reintroduce long-dead epidemics if science hadn't meddled?" he said. "How many PhD-carrying experts would be called 'Big Pharma shills' if we'd just sheathed those deadly needles? And more importantly, would the Kardashians even exist?"

The World Health Organisation has now kicked off a program of vaccination cutbacks, aimed at creating a "dumbfuck-free world" by 2020.

"Yes, we'll see a decrease of the world population in a magnitude of billions, as well as millions of small children suffering and dying from long-gone illnesses that our grandparents barely had to deal with, but it's what needs to be done," said President of the WHO, Coral Ashun. "If we want a future free of racist news website comment boards, it's sacrifice that we need to make."

And surprisingly, parents are excited.

"It's what we've wanted all along: an end to these dangerous, awful injections," said internet crawler and mother of two, Erica Danes. "I'm so, so happy: because now I can be sure we're going into a brighter future where my kids won't get autism, even if they live long enough to develop symptoms."

Ex-pat prepares himself for return to South Africa

With just one month remaining on his contract as a teacher in France, South African citizen Eric Van Der Westhuizen has kicked his preparations for his return home up a gear, with daily “South Africanisation” exercises such as whining about crime, paranoia mediation and saying ‘blerrie’ a lot helping him to build up the skills crucial to surviving in his hometown.

“Back when I lived in South Africa, I thought it wasn’t that bad,” said the soon-to-return expat. “But now, having been exposed to mostly international coverage of South Africa over the course of eight months, it turns out it’s actually a giant poverty-stricken, racist’s-haven shithole filled to the wallet-stealing, carjacking brim with crime and government corruption. It’s only right that I prepare for this, my unavoidable, return.”

According to French propriétaire (that’s ‘landlady’, you cretin) young “Vaan duh ‘Estayzan” is taking his new daily training regime very seriously.

“I hear him in his room, complaining out loud about ‘flippen reverse racism’ and ‘the fokken government’,” she told reporters yesterday evening. “And now, whenever he walks around the train station I see him gripping both straps of his backpack with white-clenched fists, pausing every few seconds to see if anyone is walking too close to him and patting his pockets in a ‘have I been robbed yet’ interpretive dance.”

The young South African reported a few months ago that he really missed South Africa, and while this daily routine may seem a tad pessimistic, Eric says this is just one small part of his program.

“You know, success is always in the small details,” he explained. “Small things most returning citizens might overlook, for example maintain a constant, 24hr, exhausting state of heightened worry and anxiety, and never sitting out of direct line-of-sight of your bags. Tiny touches, like remembering to feel a constant sensation of dread and terror whenever a shadow comes up behind me. You know, those details that most just overlook, like making a big show of locking all your car doors, leaving the window slightly ajar so that it can’t be shattered by a bunch of batteries in a sock, or even remembering to flip the entire switchboard off and sitting in depressing, awful darkness for hours on end.”

And this is just Phase One of his plan.

“Ag, it’s not all negative stuff,” he said. “I’m also doing positive stuff, like taking cheap public transport, sitting in relaxed, free public parks on weekends, taking advantage of excellent, affordable and state-reimbursed healthcare, and using high-quality, cheap internet.”

“I mean, how else am I going to make an extensive list of all Europe’s cool shit so that I can smugly bitch about how ‘blerrie backwards this blerrie flippen country is’ in two months’ time?”

Dear Chain Letter Sender

Someone sends me a chain letter. I reply.

Text reads:

Subject: This is freaky

This is freaky!!!! But ......:)

Supposedly The Phone Will Ring Right After You Do This.

Just read the little stories and think of a wish as you scroll all the way to the bottom. There is a message there then make your wish. No attachment on this one.

Stories........ I'm 13 years old, and I wished that my dad would come home from the army, because he'd been having problems with his heart and right leg. It was 2:53 p.m. When I made my wish. At 3:07 p.m.(14 minutes later), the doorbell rang, and there my Dad was, luggage and all!!

I'm Katie and I'm 20 and I've been having trouble in my job and on the verge of quitting. I made a simple wish that my boss would get a new job. That was at 1:35 and at 2:55 there was an announcement that he was promoted and was leaving for another city. Believe me...this really works!!!

My name is Ann and I am 45 years of age. I had always been single and had been hoping to get into a nice, loving relationship for any years. While kind of daydreaming (and right after receiving this email) I wished that a quality person would finally come into my life. That was at 9:10 AM on a Tuesday. At 9:55 AM a FedEx delivery man came into my office. He was cute, polite and could not stop smiling at me. He started coming back almost everyday (even without packages) and asked me out a week later. We married 6 months later and now have been happily married for 2 years. What a great email it was!!

Just scroll down to the end, but while you do, think of a wish. Make your wish when you have completed scrolling. Whatever age you are, is the number of minutes it will take for your wish to come true (ex. you are 25 years old, it will take 25 minutes for your wish to come true)

However, if you don't send this to 5 people in 5 minutes, you will have bad luck for years!! Go for it!!!

STOP!!!

Congratulations!!!

Your wish will now come true in your age minutes. Now follow this carefully....it can be very rewarding!!!! If you send this to 10 more people, other than the 5 that you already have to send to, something major that you've been wanting will happen.

Kelly

---Ends.---

I reply.

Text reads:

Dear Kelly,

Thank you for your not at all guilt-tripping, fear-exploiting email. Where most people would probably hit the ‘reply all’ key to tell not just you, but every single person who has so far played a part in this email arriving in their inbox, to strongly consider going and fucking themselves with the largest blunt object at hand, I’m not most internet idiots.

Alas, I am an idiot in one sense – I ignored your warning. Like a stubborn child who thinks he knows better, I sneered at it and hit ‘Mark as Spam’. And so, this reply is somewhat an apology – having restored it to its rightful place in my Primary Inbox and Starred and Highlighted as “Crucially Important DO NOT DELETE”, I want to say you were right.

First of all, I want to say that your chain letter holds much, much power. It practically drips with the bad luck of Ancient, Dark Magicks Now Forgotten by Man – in fact its power is so considerable, so life-impactingly terrible, that the surplus of bad luck attached to it retroactively went back in time and affected most of my life before the moment I opened this email.

How was I to know that that horrifying, unbroken 18-year dry spell of No Sex At All that I went through just after my first birthday could be tracked down (or perhaps forward?) to the moment I hit the ‘spam’ button? This goes double for my string of failed relationships up until this moment. Lots of people might try to explain away this as “purely coincidental” and “a part of life” and even “because also you’re an insensitive moron” but I think we both know why this unerring string of bad luck has ruined my life: the Dark, mystical and ill-fated Convocations and Shadow Magic of the Gods of Unforwarded Chain Mail, who know no mercy and shew no forgiveness.

You know, unless I was horrifically cruel to a variety of small, defenceless kittens in a past life. I dunno, maybe I like squished their eyes out with a stick or something.

However, given the prevailing climate of viral media – where people will forward the entire planet a picture of a dress just to argue pointlessly about what colour it is – you really need to up your game.

In our modern age of ubiquitous social media it is very difficult for old artforms like this to compete against the vapid garbage that gets spread around faster than measles at Disneyland, or Government bailout money at an SABC Board Meeting.

We see death, disease and war on the news every day. People have become desensitised to these old passive chain letter threats. You need to ramp up the guilt. You need to ramp up the fear. You need to up the ante, elevate the stakes: give the people something to lose, something to fear, and you’ll see millions of shares.

Well, that, or just put a spelling mistake in the Subject line.

And so, I’ve taken the liberty to rewrite your email to be more contemporary.

--- Chain Letter 2.0 ---

Dear Kelly

This is freaky, but…..

Suppose your entire family will be murdered by Ebola-infected ISIS extremists while global warming drowns every person you’ve ever loved in a sea of blood and oil if you ignore this email?

Just read the little stories and think of a wish as you scroll all the way to the bottom. There is a message there then make your wish. No attachment on this one.

Stories........ I'm 13 years old, and I wished that my dad would come home from the army, because he'd been having problems with his heart and right leg. It was 2:53 p.m when I ignored this email. At 3:07 p.m.(14 minutes later), the doorbell rang, and there my Dad was, in a coffin, his head on stake with the words “I never loved you, you whore disappointment” smeared on my favourite dress in his blood and excrement. Then I got beheaded by ISIS, roughly ten minutes after I succumbed to the dreaded Ebola virus.

I'm Katie and I'm 20 and I've been having trouble in my job and on the verge of quitting. I made a simple wish that my boss would get a new job. I ignored this email and then immediately contracted Ebola and smallpox, which before now was widely believed to have been completely eradicated. Not only that, but my boss fired me and hired ISIS agents in their place. Their first job was to be behead my children. Believe me...this really works!!!

My name is Ann and I am 45 years of age. I had always been single and had been hoping to get into a nice, loving relationship for any years. While kind of daydreaming (and right after receiving this email) I wished that a quality person would finally come into my life. That was at 9:10 AM on a Tuesday. At 9:55 AM a FedEx delivery man came into my office. He was cute, polite and could not stop smiling at me. He started coming back almost every day (even without packages) and asked me out a week later. We married 6 months later and now have been happily married for 2 years. However, right now he is holding a machete against my neck and forcing me to write this. Having tricked me into thinking true love exists, he wishes to show me the error of having ignored this chain email. Allahu Ackbar PS my children have ebola and got autism from vaccines.

Just scroll down to the end, but while you do, think of a wish. Make your wish when you have completed scrolling. Whatever age you are, is the number of minutes it will take for your wish to come true (ex. you are 25 years old, it will take 25 minutes for your wish to come true)

However, if you don't send this to 5 people in 5 minutes, you will have bad luck for years AND DIE A VIRGIN IN AN ISIS TERROR DEN WHILE WATCHING EVERY HUMAN BEING YOU’VE EVER PASSED IN THE STREET SUFFER A PAINFUL AND POINTLESS DEATH. Go for it!!!

STOP!!!

Congratulations!!!

Your wish will now come true in your age minutes. Now follow this carefully....it can be very rewarding!!!! If you send this to 10 more people, other than the 5 that you already have to send to, something major that you've been wanting will happen.

Matthew

---

Please immediately send this email back to me so that I know you haven’t been beheaded.

In the meantime, I’, going to visit a Sangoma who promises me that, by just drinking his secret magic potion every night before bed, burning a special herb to chase away the Tokoloshe, and sleeping with a secret rock of the ancestors under my pillow, I should be clear of bad luck, financial troubles and relationship woes by Sunday.

That should go really well with the massive penis he promised I’d have.

Yours sincerely and apologetically,

Internaut, believer in lost dark gods, soon to be 18-incher

Matthew de Klerk

Name changed because people will know who I'm talking about if I use her name.
Jen.

Not that you know her of courseWINKWINK

Newspapers don’t publish

Newstands and paper racks across the world were utterly bare yesterday, after news organisations worldwide failed to publish a single newspaper because “nothing bad happened”.

“As we all know, traumatic, horrifying, shallow or fear-mongering stories are our bread and butter,” said News Media Expert Ngud Gnuus. “But yesterday, there was no war, no famine, no murder, no rapes, no burglaries, no car accidents… nothing. How can we make a 24-page newspaper if no one dies or does something that makes you want to draw the curtains, stay locked indoors all day or just straight-out kill yourself?”

Gnuus went on to say that, despite the ever-worsening conflict in the Gaza strip and between Israel and Palestine, deeping strife and socioeconomic disparities across the seven continents and rampant crime rates, there was somehow nothing bad enough happening out of which to make an endlessly repeating loop of controversy and stern-anchored news coverage.

“It makes no sense, we know, but nothing bad happened. Usually there are any thousands of examples which we can shock and horrify you with, but yesterday it was only good stuff. How can we possibly sell papers with that?”

However, some newspapers have decided to rise to the challenge, releasing small online reports in spite of yesterday’s paucity of source material.

“We’ve decided to put a different spin on it,” said Editor of CNN Deborah Hardings. “We have headlines like World braces itself for inevitable explosion of crime, death and Bus full of School kids will definitely careen off road into ravine and blow up tomorrow, say experts. If the news media knows one thing, it’s how to turn no story into the top story of the day. Just look at any news story where our cameras and microphones are outside in the street or at a press conference or even outside a hospital where a royal baby is about to be born. Usually in these spots, we are just waiting for something to happen. That’s news, baby.”

Muse and Abuse will keep you updated today, as more nothing happens.

The Brain on 23: a response

A response to this eye-opening, Pulitzer-winning piece that cuts to the very bone

We are the 23-year-olds. We are the ones privileged enough to have jobs to feel awkward in because we don’t quite fit in with the other privileged people we work with. We strut through city streets with eyes cast toward our screens that our privilege and money or perhaps our rich parents allows us to afford, desperately seeking our privileged access to a global network of information that will somehow validate our lives or decisions, even if it’s just a stranger or a shallow internet post. We work hard – just a few hours of procrastination on social media here and there, scout’s honour – in jobs we’re lucky enough to have and be qualified for that we’re somehow still ungrateful for because we want to make our privileged access to a top-quality education feel worth it, and we’re privileged enough to occupy a social position that makes us attractive to others or that makes us being in a relationship with another person not universally hated or spat on by other people.

We spend privileged hours of free time drinking wine in our privileged apartments that are probably equipped with all kinds of modern fittings, promising one another that those who broke our hearts will not own us forever, because we, the privileged children, haven’t matured to the stage where we can forgive and forget past mistakes. We zone out in expensive grad school classrooms or teach English in Rwanda, all the while wondering if we are supposed to be somewhere else instead of making the most of our lives and situations.

We are 23, and maybe hangovers hurt. Maybe they don’t. I dunno. I hate to generalise. Most of our conversations these days centre on assuring one another that we’re going to be okay, because we’re the kind of unprepared, insecure children who need to have our hands held for the rest of our lives. When a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than the dirt and scraps many hundreds of people have to survive on on a daily basis, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup, because duh, success is just supposed to be inevitable and immediate without any real struggle, am I right?

We dance all night to Taylor Swift on our iPods and radios blaring through expensive speakers or car stereos because she, as an equally privileged member of our age demographic, understands what it’s like to pretend that a breakup at 23 can be lifechanging. We hate labels, except those smeared on us by sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, those 4chans of journalism. We are not in college anymore, and we long for the days of running back and forth between houses at 1am, because change is frightening, and we are scared, so scared, won’t somebody hold my hand? We have few obligations (because we’re so lucky) yet we are always stressed (because having a simple job to do is more pressing than a 2000-word essay due in four weeks), wondering if life will ever be more certain.

Our breakups never end because when we see pictures of our exes on social media we don’t have the balls to grow up and move on. Even when we block them or unfriend them, we still get all teary-eyed and red-faced at the sight of a combination of letters that forms a name. We hate online dating, but we do it anyway, because relating to real people with real problems beyond the glass wall that stands between us and the Instagram photo of the world beyond our morning poached eggs and salmon on rye is just too testing. We spend as much time swiping on Tinder as we do with actual human beings, because let’s face it, it’s easier to be shallow and not be arsed to have, like, a conversation beyond the bare essentials or sex/age/location/DTF?.

We are 23, and we constantly try to tell outselves to stop complaining and enjoy our youth, making article very ironic indeed. Life isn’t that bad. It really isn’t, you know, apart from when Woolworth’s runs out of Fruits of the Forest organic eco-friendly soy yoghurt. We have families, our friends and our health. We are young and vibrant and the world is ours. We are closer to our parents than the 23-year-olds who came before us who weren’t shipped off to war. We are so lucky, and yet still all this fear remains.

We hear grown-ups – you know, those ones who arguably shared the same privileges as us? - urge us to calm down. We still use phrases like “grown-ups”. They tell us to calm down, that it will all fall into place, but we don’t believe them. Things just don’t fall into place – you know, apart from not starving or living under a brutal dictatorship or having to live on R9 a day or watch our children die from easily preventable diseases. We feel like every second we spend streaming movies from our bedrooms is a second we are not putting ourselves out there. You know, not because we’re sitting in our bloody bedroom streaming movies and not putting ourselves out there, but because reasons. And yet we stream on. Reasons. Sad. Are you crying yet?

We waste time the same way we did in college. We are at the point in our lives where we have realised the futility of sitting around watching whatever series we have privileged access to that we’ve have time and privilege enough to watch a hundred times over, but we lack the resources (not time or money or privilege, that we have plenty of) and maturity to actually do something about it. We are too old to go out every night, but we are too young to stay in and do nothing – you know, us, who apparently hate labels but who are also somehow only to happy to let them totally define us and control our every waking moment and fear and desire. We want to be more productive and live a more worthwhile existence, but obviously our values system is so warped along the lines of what constitutes a “worthwhile existence” that we are totally dumbstruck. We don’t yet have children or spouses or secure jobs – you know, these things than many people around the world can’t or don’t have and therefore are living worthless, meaningless existences. And so we sit in this limbo. Sad me. Cry. Wah.

You know, this started out as a tongue-in-cheek reply to that bullshit shallow garbage that is endless spewed out by trivial, vapid and moronic 'viral' media sites for self-loathing, self-victimising people my age to swallow hook, line and sinker, but I physically don’t have the effort to poke another stick into its decaying, festering ribcage.

I mean, do you even realise what you’re reading? It's littered with contradictions: "we hate labels" > proceeds to label all people aged 23; "we're too old to go out every night" AND YET "We dance all night to Taylor Swift"? For fuck’s sakes, you have the rest of our lives ahead of you and the fact that you agree with an article like this is a world of proof that you should get off the worry wagon. If you’re worried about your life, change it. Jesus. Do you really believe you are some modern-day tortured soul who is not understood by society, who doesn’t fit in, who feels they live in a world that has moved on?

Really? You really think that at 23 your life “detonates as we suddenly forget why we chose that major or moved to this city or loved that person”? Really?

You’re fucking 23 years old. Start acting like it.

Racist whites accidentally go into hiding

Hundreds of terrified white people accidentally ran into their panic rooms this afternoon, after a link on social media site Twitter announced that Nelson Mandela had died.

The totally legitimate news site, which isn't owned by some Los Angeles-based writing workshop and obviously has an outstanding history of ground-breaking reportage, broke a story this morning that the world-renowned icon had died last night.

This is the, like, fourth time in recent memory.

"We were already a third of a way through our first can of stockpiled Oom Tony's baked beans when our friend tweeted at us that it was just a media scare hoax," said 56-year-old ex-NP member Johannes van Der Merwestuysen.

Officials of the right-wing extreme have, however, told its sheep followers not to dismiss the notion."This was just a practice run. Keep those panic buttons handy," said Ewjean Tirblanch, leader of a party that holds these beliefs.

However, some biological, political and religious analysts have suggested that perhaps the report was true.

"What if he really DID die and is now still alive? The implications are massive..." said Jake Manders, a professor of something at some university somewhere. "He might be a vampire."

However, ANC officials (who took time off their busy schedules waving the "remember Mandela and vote for us again as if the two are related" flag) have been quick to debunk these rumours.

"Mandela is still very much alive. We just aren't going to show him to cameras or have a press release unless it directly benefits our political agenda in some way," said spokesperson Moore Bidity.

In spite of this, many conspiracy theories still prevail.

"They are using him! They are sucking the blood and warmth and money from this country - imagine if they get his DNA and use it? We'll be dealing with super-vampires! [rest of comment censored due to the hateful nature of its bigoted, racist content]" said news24 commenter a conscientious, experienced political analyst.

However, in light of all this, South Africans have had to deal with the idea that Mandela could, at any moment, die. 

"It's a horrible thought," said television news editor Vuyo Ristic. "What we are focusing on right now is exercising our Constitutionally-enshrined right to access of information and freedom of speech to get a camera in his room. Hopefully we won't be too late - imagine if we can't catch the big moment on full 1080p High Defintion TV?" 

Hundreds of other editors across the country are also worried.

"We've had these stacks of M-day obituaries, histories, timelines, interviews, profiles and features pieces stacking up since he first coughed loudly seven years ago," said Pippin Tom. 

Even political leaders have voiced their worries.

"He's kind of the last visible link to the struggle," said ANC campaign organiser Fan Tomvhotes. "People might get shocked into realising the truth of modern SA."

Even the DA aired their thoughts.

"zOMG WE WERE  A PART OF THE STRUGGLE TOO WE WERE THERE WITH BIKO AND MADIBA FORM THE BEGINING RAGERAGEERAGE VOTE FOR US THIS TIME #knowyourDA" they said in a Tweet, which you can't fling poop at.

Following the brief controversy, hundreds of newspapers, twitter feeds, and news organisations reported that the family would like the media to respect their wishes and keep their distance from the family.