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."

Scientists on brink of finding autism vaccine

We are on the edge of a better tomorrow – or so say scientists from the National Centre For Disease Control. Virologist and bacteriologists have released a statement that has stunned the world, saying they are “on the very precipice” of finally finding a vaccine against vaccine-based-autism.

“It’s been a long, difficult road, but we really do think we’re about to crack it,” said Dr Robert Harrolson of the NSCD. “It’s our hope that, one day, our children will be able to get vaccinated without an unnecessary, scientifically unfounded, clinically disproved, medically discredited fear of developing autism.”

Already, clinical trials have shown huge success – in the form of first human test subject Billy Henderson, who, for the entirety of the tests remained “100% free from autism”.

“Despite having received every possible vaccine – against things you really should fear your child getting, like Polio or the Whooping Cough – little Billy didn’t get autism,” explained Dr Harrolson, a hopeful smile on his face. “Yeah, sure, neither did about 99% of the worldwide control group of millions of children who also got vaccine, but we don’t like to make baseless claims that there’s a link between those two separate statistics.”

Dr Harrolson now believes that the vaccine, Salinine (better known by its scientific name Aqueous 1-1 monosodium-monochloride), will be commercially available for parents everywhere.

However, not all parents share his optimism.

“I’d never put that poison in my kids body,” said Crystal therapy practitioner and homeopathic expert Jennifer McCarthy. “After googling ‘bad effects of autism vaccine’ for three hours I found a single paper that says it causes some rare disease that I don’t really understand but sounds really, really terrifying.”

“Besides,” she added, “it’s my right as a parent to decide what life-threatening illness my child contracts in his life – and it’s against my religion. If God wants my child to die of an easily preventable disease, who are we to use so-called ‘scientific advances’ to stop His Divine Will?”

In spite of the stoic resistance to this possible new world-changing development, scientists remain hopeful of that this is merely the first step towards the ultimate vaccine.

"With advances like these becoming evermore prevalent, we're steadily getting closer and closer to the day we produce the greatest vaccine of them all," said Harrolson. "A vaccine against human stupidity."

Alumnus pleased to see uni debate “still as divisive, toxic as ever”

“Some things never change,” says 25-year-old with a smile as she scans the university’s Facebook page

Rhodes University alumni are pleased today, after a brief perusal of the university’s Facebook page confirmed it still contained all the vitriol, ad hominem comments and logical fallacies that hundreds of ex-Rhodents grew so accustomed to in their time at Rhodes.

According to 25-year-old Financial Analyst Jeanine Dee – just one of hundreds of students who attended Rhodes University and is glad to see the continuation of such a beloved ritual – it’s like she never left.

“I’m glad that not much has changed,” she said. “I mean, when you look at the majority of the posts, there are still a lot of people and many students who use weasel wording, among many other rhetorical fallacies.”

“And it’s not just that: I see spelling mistakes, ALL-CAPS arguments, a lack of critical thinking that fails to take into account the nuances of these complex debates, and even people just outright saying ‘oh, you’re clearly irrational and stupid, there’s no point in arguing with you’,” she said. “I’m just glad to see that a university education is still producing such excellent and thought-provoking discourse.”

And it doesn’t end there.

“There’s also that lack of a sense of humour that was so frequent in our flame-wars,” she said. “I remember when I was second year and I said ‘guys, just chill’ and then posted a meme making fun of the whole silly furore. Now, just like back then, I see people still tell these calm heads to ‘GTFO’ and explain in great detail why their attitude and comment is ‘so problematic’. I’m just glad that there’s still that good old vituperative mud-slinging that made me unsubscribe from the page all those years ago.”

However, some alumni say that it’s “so much more than it was in our time” and that this new wave of debate has “taken things to a new level”.

“Back in my day, I was never told by someone making a controversial assertion that ‘it’s not their job to educate you’, or even that I ‘should go do my bloody reading’ without providing a link or idea what these readings may be,” said 27-year-old MSocSci graduate Erin Jackson. “I don’t know why we didn’t see it before; it makes total sense. After all, they’re the ones making the argument. Why should the burden of proof be on them?”

Despite this heaped praise, the current student body has discounted the alumni’s response, saying that it’s “invalid”.

“We’re not saying that current membership to an in-group is an obligatory prerequisite to taking part in such controversial topics that affect not just our university or even our whole nation, but many many, many universities and nations across the globe...” said SRC Social Media Councillor Ray Sandgenda.

“... but seriously, do you even go here?”

NASA pledges $100b program to find intelligent life on Earth

Citing the age-old adage that “you can’t run before you’ve learnt to crawl”, the National Aeronautical Space Agency has today announced their suspension of the multi-million dollar program to find intelligent life out in space - in favour of a multi-billion dollar program to first find intelligent life on Earth.

NASA, which first started their SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) wing in the 1980s, says that it’s about time we found sentient, thinking, smart beings on our slice of the solar system.

“We know it’s a needle-in-a-haystack operation,” said NASA’s chief coordinator for the global search program SEBI (Search for Earth-Based Intelligence), Rocky Tjips. “Given our long and mentally-undeveloped history of race-based hatred, purposeful environmental destruction, war, ethnic cleansing, the News24 comments section and One Direction being a thing that people actively enjoy, we realise that this task may even be more difficult than scanning the billions upon billions of stars for signs of intelligent life – but we’re up for the challenge.”

“After all,” he added, “how can we possibly start looking for intelligent life out there, if we haven’t even found any down here?”

Scientists now say that intelligent life could
theoretically exist on Earth.

And while some detractors argue that human beings do show isolated, tiny sparks of intellect, NASA holds firm that, given the circumstances, these claims are exaggerated at the least and statistical outliers at the most.

“Yeah, people do throw around names like ‘Einstein’ or ‘Hawkings’ or even ‘Newton’, but honestly, just weigh that up against the billions of morons these guys rub shoulders with,” rebuked Tjips. “Seriously, we used to think that the moon was a god, and that radium was a great pick-me up tonic and ingredient in makeup,” he stressed. “These guys were just huge statistical blips, outweighed by the multitudinous nincompoops who, say, think Fox News gives balanced reportage, or think that Ebola is a real threat to anyone visiting the Southern African regions.”

The search, says Tjips, is now on, and despite initial negative results, he says they’re confident they’ll find something soon.

“We’ve gone through the comment sections of most major websites, almost all of my Facebook feed, most Instagram accounts, and thousands of celebrity Twitter handles,” he said. “Sure, it’s a tiresome process of elimination, and yes, everything we’ve found just confirms our belief that human beings are primordial, cognitively underdeveloped scum, but eventually we’ll find something. I mean, it’s not like most people are so stupid it makes you blink and recoil from your screen, right? Right?”

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.