Who else remembers watching the western TV series, Death Valley Days, with their grandparents back in the 1960s? It was hosted by Ronald Reagan, and sponsored by 20 Mule Team Borax, a company that sold cleaning products based on sodium tetraborate, which used to be mined in Death Valley, and hauled out by wagons drawn by — you guessed it — 20 mule teams. If only I’d known then what glorious fate the future held for Reagan, and now borax.
Borax is a caustic substance that you can use for cleaning, but also as an insecticide and for unclogging pipes. I haven’t heard of it being used as a floor wax or a dessert topping, at least not yet, but it does have a novel new utility here in the 21st Century…oh god, I also remember watching a show called The 21st Century, hosted by Walter Cronkite, every Sunday at my grandparents’ after church. Walter would tell us all about the technological wonders we’ll see in the 21st century, you know, now, but he missed this one.
A “Dr” Carrie Madej is promoting borax as a method for “undoing” a vaccination.
In a TikTok video that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Dr. Carrie Madej outlined the ingredients for a bath she said will “detox the vaxx” for people who have given into Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
The ingredients in the bath are mostly not harmful, although the supposed benefits attached to them are entirely fictional. Baking soda and epsom salts, she falsely claims, will provide a “radiation detox” to remove radiation Madej falsely believes is activated by the vaccine. Bentonite clay will add a “major pull of poison,” she says, based on a mistaken idea in anti-vaccine communities that toxins can be removed from the body with certain therapies.
Then, she recommends adding in one cup of borax, a cleaning agent that’s been banned as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration, to “take nanotechnologies out of you.”
You know this doesn’t work, right? It’s not going to affect the action of a vaccine, it’s not going extract anything, and it’s not going to “melt” nanotechnologies that aren’t even present in the vaccine. It is going to act as a skin and eye irritant, it could produce unpleasant rashes (that’s a sign that it’s working
, I can imagine the quacks saying), and borax exposure has been linked to infertility (See? I told you the vax would make you infertile — I got the jab and then bathed in borax, and now I can’t have babies
).
And that’s not all. Now that a majority of the population has been vaccinated, and the dire consequences predicted by the quacks have not come to pass, they are rushing to invent new problems that don’t exist, like vaccine toxins, that they can not cure with bizarre new treatments that don’t work.
Now, some anti-vaccine groups are recommending that people who have been vaccinated should immediately self-administer cupping therapy (an ancient form of alternative medicine that involves creating suction on the skin) to speed up the “removal of the vax content” including first making small incisions on the injection site with a razor. Other memes give instructions on how to “un-inject” shots using syringes.
Any day now we’ll hear that they’re going to be treating vaccination non-problems with black salve or psychic surgery. Mark my words, this is going to be a growth market, given the abundance of stupidity in the population.
Uncle Walter, I am so disappointed in you. You never told us about this future awaiting us.
It’s magical Mary Poppins mythology:
“Just…a…cupful of borax make the nanotechnologies shut down”
Borax is good for making forge welds in the blacksmith shop too.
Not that I would know why such things were ever considered important, but bentonite has an interesting history amongst a certain segment of the population (ie- those trying to shall we say pee clean). It was called (or still is?) Sonne’s #7.
Whether it removes nanobots or unchanges your precious DNA I dunno. I would say once your B-lymphocytes start down the path of vaccine induced affinity maturation your precious DNA is doomed.
The bentonite clay might interfere with the nanobots nefarious plans. Did it ever work for weed detection? Could paranoid ideation induced by excessive weed be leading to the popular nanobot fears?
Vaccinations are always a Faucian bargain that can’t be undone, especially the hypermutation thingy. So much horrific culling of lymphocytes, dying for what? Evil somatic Darwinism I say 🤗🤣
I am old enough to have watched The Twentieth Century (basically a way to re-show old, sometimes misleading, documentaries). But I always loved the commercial break in the middle, when Walter Cronkite would say “the twentieth century will continue after this announcement”. They never told us what century it would be during the commercial.
I recall that borax is used as an ant poison, the nest thing being that the ants eat it,go back to the nest and die. Being non wasteful creatures the others eat the dead ant, and are in turn killed. Nest, eh.
We just need a zombie strain of anti Vaxxers, and we can get rid of the lot!
Death Valley Days was a little before my time. However I’ve head numerous references to the show made on MST3K especially when the movie would switch to a desert scene and Crow would chime in using his best Ronnie Ray-gun impression: “Welcome to Death Valley Days.”
EDIT: I heard
On a more serious note, for those of us not cowering wusses when it comes to vaccinations, I’ve been doing remedial reading on immunology and been trying to differentiate IgA from IgG per response to vaccination. Secretory IgA specific to SARS-CoV-2 epitopes in your nostrils might be a good thing, but if there after mRNA vaccination by Comirnaty (Pfizer) or Spikevax (Moderna), how long does it last?:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.744887/full
“ Conclusion: Comirnaty induces S1-specific IgA and IgG responses with neutralizing activity in the nasal mucosa; a similar response is not seen with CoronaVac.”
[…]
“Discussion
…The clinical implication of the induction of nasal SARS-CoV-2 NAb is an increased likelihood of immediate protection at the target site of viral infection. The role that this mucosal immune response may play in reducing the risk of virus transmission should also be considered. However, a rapid decline of the NELF antibody levels was observed around 40 to 60 days after the booster dose.”
Let’s hope that this “detox” doesn’t send anybody to the morgue.
On the plus side, I don’t seem to recall people injecting themselves with bleach in large numbers.
On the other hand, I fear the day that one of these quacks devizes a “treatment” that will kill people in large numbers.
And the agonizing death you’ll undergo is a feature, not a bug. Thanks, Ronnie!
I remember watching Death Valley Days and liking the show, without any grandparents who didn’t live close by. It was in the 1950s on a black and white TV.
Wikipedia:
Created in 1930 by Ruth Woodman, the program was broadcast on radio until 1945. From 1952 to 1970, it became a syndicated television series, with reruns (updated with new narrations) continuing through August 1, 1975.
I have a dear friend who has fallen down the antivax hole. I’m tempted to troll him by sending him links to all the batshit crazy “miracle cures” being bandied about, but I’m afraid he might actually try them. He never did well in school, but he’s supremely confident in his “research.”
FFS, what happened to the power of prayer??? God is in charge and prayer can do anything (supposedly). Except prevent employers from requiring vaccines as a condition of employment.
I’m sure Imaginary jesus can prevent any imaginary vaccination problems.
They really can’t keep their stories straight. They don’t even try.
Some of the quack antivaxx treatments have seriously harmed and occasionally killed people. Ivermectin overdoses have been fatal and being hospitalized is common.
The real harm here is when they actually believe their delusions and stay away from the hospitals while eating horse dewormer until they just flat out…die. Happens a lot these days.
In my local area, some days around a quarter to a half of all Covid-19 virus deaths occur among people at home.
This is the latest trend among antivaxxer groups.
Don’t go to the hospital because their treatment protocols are killing Covid-19 virus patients.
Or if you are there, just leave.
Very few patients leave against AMA, Against Medical Advice, which is anyone’s legal right. They won’t stop you. It rarely happens because by the time the Covid-19 viral patients get there, they can’t even walk, much less walk out.
I’ve heard of a few cases where the patients actually did leave AMA. Every single one of them died within a few days.
It seems to be much more common for infected patients to just avoid the hospital altogether and sit at home eating horse dewormer. You don’t hear much about them though.
They are just found at home dead and eventually put in their pine Freedom Forever Boxes.
Never mind the nanotech, the Singularity should happen any moment now, then we can ask the AIs how to get people to take the goddamn vaccines.
None of you are old enough to remember the Old Ranger??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Andrews
…kids these days…
fusilier, who just checked and, yes, Boraxo is still for sale
James 2:24
Now I am waiting for the Eschaton to send a Black Monolith back in time, with vaccine advice inscribed on it.
“Psychic surgery”? That sounds like a permit to print money. Just give me a few weeks to get my on-line –scam– business up and running.
Well, that doesn’t bode well if they’re working down the reagent shelf alphabetically.
I certainly remember Death Vally Days, no grandparents there though. Soapy.
From Kevin Bass on twitter:
Personally, I’m down with them trying to remove the vax after the fact. As long as they get vaccinated.
rsmith@9 you’re not supposed to inject yourself with bleach, you’re supposed to drink it. Dummies have been drinking something called Miracle Mineral Solution(and other names), a concoction that’s actually a form of bleach, for years. Unfortunately some people give it to their kids, such as some parents of autistic kids.
birgerjohansson@18 actual psychic surgeons use slight of hand tricks to appear to pull tumors and so forth out of their “patients.” They’ll poke around heir stomachs or whatever and produce a lump of meat.
On a lighter note in Canada we had the series Here Come The Seventies, which aired from 1970 to 1973. For a show that aired on the commercial network CTV it had a racy for the era opening.
The theme music was “Tillicum,” by the Canadian electronic group Syrinx. It just broke into the Canadian Top 40 at number 38, predating Hot Butter’s smash hit “Popcorn” by more than a year.
I watched Death Valley Days before Ronald Reagan. The original host was Stanley Andrews known as “The Old Ranger.” Actually Reagan killed the show for us because my dad didn’t like him.
I didn’t watch with my grandparents because they didn’t have televisions.
I was zooming with friends last night and the retired virologist told us about the vaccine cleansing hoax. The story he told is that people put various things in the water which gives it a color…voila! Proof that the hokum is removing the toxins. We’re a nation with too many suckers.
@22- timgueguen
Did Syrinx, being a Canadian trio, ever employ temple priests? Priests of the Temples of Syrinx?
But there’s a hidden meaning— Syrinx…syringe, band member named Pringle…Pringles can. Pringles cantennas are hacks for boosting wifi signal. So a syringe introduces 5G nano cantennas into your body. Syrinx was also where the Solar Federation priests were located and in 2112 the protaganist represented the nude butted individual against the state depicted by a pentacle. We all know based on Church Lady teachings it can only mean…Satan!!!. Wait where was I going with this?
You should change the title of the post to “The Stupid, It Burns!”
Re: raven @ #13 & #14…
I have mixed feelings about all that. On the one hand, one doesn’t want to just stand by and left people die because of stupidity. On the other hand, they’re clearing out of ICU beds needed for people who didn’t do something stupid.
Re; anat @ #20…
It’s now a “thing” to get a COVID booster and a flu shot at the same time. That’s what I did yesterday (and, no, not as a way to “neutralize” the COVID shot–and, just FYI, no adverse reaction to either of them).
If these yahoos think the flu shot will negate the COVD, by all means encourage them to do that. Won’t cure their stupidity, but it will get them vaccinated against both virii and that’s all to the good.
I’m really tired of all the contrarian nonsense. If unvaccinated people think the doctors are trying to kill them, and think COVID is a hoax, then by all means, I do hope they stay at home and die there. -they won’t be putting others at risk or depleting limited resources and energy trying to fight an infection that could have been easily prevented by a readily available, free vaccine.
fuck’em, let them die in their homes if they can’t act like reasonable adults
The reason Cronkite didn’t cover this is that the people who believe this shit aren’t living in the 21st century. Maybe the 12th.
In the 50s, my family watched Death Valley Days, hosted by The Old Ranger (seen after the Borax ad). We liked The Old Ranger and didn’t like it when Ronald Reagan took over. Never liked him, I’m proud to say.
if it wasn’t for the fact that the un-vaccinated anti-VAXes would be a reservoir for the continuing spread of the virus I might not care if the got vaccinated or not. at this point I am less willing to try to convince any of the conspiracy nuts about any damn fool thing they come up with. They do cause trouble however and the effort should be made to help them, they do need it and it is not good for society to have a large percent of the population that are that delusional running around lose. I can’t help them I have lost all patients I would just as likely just start yelling at them
As was mentioned above borax is a very useful flux in forge welding i do not know if it is a component in ark-welding flux or not the composition of which is not easily found by me I would not surprised however it is a valuable commodity and still mined there I think
I could remember the name of the first guy who introduced the stories on Death Valley Days but when I clicked on the link that was the guy alright. I did not like it when they changed to Reagan and did not watch it as often after that.
A classic western movie buy some of the best western actors I would highly recommend is “20 Mule Team” with Wallace Berry and Leo Carrillo nice story and very funky not much in the way of white hats and spinney teeth
.
timgueguen@22
For a moment I thought that there might be limit to human stupidity. Silly me.
Nemo @ #29 — “The reason Cronkite didn’t cover this is that the people who believe this shit aren’t living in the 21st century. Maybe the 12th.”
In which case, Cronkite would have covered them in his other series, You Are There.
Re: Unclefroggy @ #31…
Is “ark-welding” the way the frame for Ken Ham’s fake ark was fastened together?
Re: robro @#33…
That brings back memories…
Speaking of old TV programs sponsored by companies that manufactured harmful chemicals, I seem to recall that Walter Cronkite’s program was sponsored by Union Carbide.
Reminds me of Scientology’s De-toxification Rundown. An expensive Scientology bit of quackery involving long and frequent saunas and massive doses of Niacin. Supposed to remove toxins caused by past drug use et al. Luckily, Hubbard never knew about high colonics. Those are still popular among some woo woo quack peddlers to remove toxins et al.
I’m going to need her to show her work on this one.
Dr Carrie Madej | The Great Ontario Fraud
Occurs to me to mention in the context of borax… One used to find Boraxo hand soap in bathrooms at gas stations (remember gas stations with publicly accessible bathrooms?). Stuff was gritty and would practically stip the skin off your hands. Good for removing grease, though. Was probably there for the mechanics (remember when gas stations had mechanics on duty?).
Wow, well I guess you can’t vaccinate against stupidity. Ignorance can be fixed but stupidity….smdh
You can still buy Boraxo powdered hand soap just about anywhere including Walmart and Amazon.
You can still buy 20 Mule Team Borax about anywhere also, including Walmart, Amazon, Dollar General, Target, etc..
Borax is no longer mined in Death Valley but in Boron, California. Boron is in Kern county, sort of halfway between LA and Death Valley.
I hear Tide pods go down much easier with a little Terro on top.
My experience of TV with the grandparents was Lawrence Welk and Carol Burnett. They had a color TV!
@44- fishy
Yeah Lawrence Welk plays into my paternal grandparent experience…and the Massachusetts obsession with “candlepin bowling” on TV (why?).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlepin_bowling
Candlepin Super Bowl 1982???:
https://youtu.be/FXOVX5kqv7Y
I found Carol Burnett on my own. She might have been too radical for grandma. Much better than Welk or candlepin bowling.
@34
thanks for not noticing or mentioning the all the other f…ups it looked all right this morning but………
Re: unclefroggy @ #46…
I noticed several of them (don’t know if I spotted them all), but that one I could make a topical (for what gets discussed here) joke about it. So it’s more not commenting.
I try to avoid commenting on spelling errors, as I make plenty of them myself and don’t catch all of them.
Oddly enough, today I made light of someone using “mhz” (which, in context for that site should have been MHz, anyway) for a powerbank, instead of mAh. He completely missed the point (and someone else then commented, “Whoosh!”)
“See? I told you the vax would make you infertile — I got the jab and then bathed in borax, and now I can’t have babies”
It’ll be worse than that.
“See? I told you the vax would make you infertile – I can’t have kids now, even though I’ve bathed in borax once a week ever since.”
The real crime here, of course, is that no one has recognized the reference to “a floor wax or a dessert topping.” As the original reference would agree, it’s both! I decry the loss of cultural literacy represented in the previous comments.
Of course, I jest. Keep fighting the good fight, people!
Yeah, I watched that show in real time. And every other Old West nostalgia TV show that ran in those years. I literally suckled at the teat of the noble White Man With A Gun fantasy. What else was a boy to do at 8:00 pm in the 50s? There were only three channels. We lived in Bakersfield while my dad was stationed in Korea and I knew what Death Valley was like. Borax to me was a strange sounding name for something that was mined in the desert. You used it to wash clothes? Weird. My mom never bought any that I can recall.
I’ll pass on the borax treatment because I added yet another round of vaccinations to go into my extensive jab file. Last week I got my booster and flu shots simultaneously. Another four days lost to lethargy, body aches and joint pain. Nobody warned me that the two-fer was going to make me feel so lousy. Worse than my second Moderna jab. If I had it to do over again I’d get them separately.
@45 Hemidactylus
Burnett seems to be a genuinely good person, but I have to say the hellscape that came after her show in the seventies is a burden on her soul.
Variety shows. Ugh.
When they started to give shows to one-hit wonders (Starland Vocal Band) and street mimes(Shields and Yarnell), you knew it had gone beyond too far.
The original composer of Popcorn was Gershon Kingsley’s First Moog Quartet. Hot Butter did the cover of it. Kingsley also wrote the Baroque Hoedown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHmc7ey7gns
My elementary school used boraxo in its bathroom powdered soap dispensers. There was no such thing as liquid soap, I think? It was scratchy but I don’t remember it being all that irritating.
It is hilarious to me that the wikipedia article describes Reagan as going directly to governorship from Death Valley Days.
After both shots and now a booster, still no 5G.
Probably because my phone is only 4G.
Read some drivel on CNN that the chemophobe crowd are also claiming that graphene oxide is in the vaccines as well. Odd, given that it’d be plainly visible in such a clear solution, but the, logic ain’t that crowd’s suit.
Still, I got the most common side effect, as is typical for me, 5 hours post injection – a very sore deltoid and mild malaise. Beats getting the virus by lightyears.
As for nasal mucusal vaccines, it still doesn’t protect entry via the GI tract, nor would it lower viral shedding into sewage, which is a well documented phenomena.
Karachi has reports of an unknown platelet depleting infection that has symptoms entirely consistent with dengue, but all tests have come up negative for presence of dengue virus.
Could just be a novel strain of dengue, but then, it could be around a dozen critters since it was first observed in 2008.
Yeah, there’s always another beast around the corner. Mother Nature’s bioweapons labs show us to be mere pikers.
As for MMS, aka ClO2, great for chlorinating drinking water, lousy for anything one doesn’t oxidize, such as one’s GI tract.
Borax is obviously the commander of the evil aliens coming to Earth in preparation of an invasion.
.
Hemidactylus @ 24 should win a prize if sorts. One of the “internets”?
If you want to talk about stupidity, Britain has a PM that does not know what the single market/customs union was even though he brought Britain out of it.
The editor of Financial Times had several sources that were present at an infamous meeting where this fact was revealed.
This is the kind of aggressive, bull-headed stupidity you normally only see in the likes of Trump.
The sad/funny thing about the first two parts of the “detox bath” is that epsom salts are sold as a bath soaking additive (some people claim it’s good for your muscles, mostly it feels nice so you stay in the tub long enough for the heat to work), and baking soda is a major ingredient in those bath fizzies that are so popular. (It’s the part that makes it fizz when you put it in the tub.)
So this “detox bath” recipe goes “fine, fine, really bad!”.