A jailbird and spouse abuser claims to have debated me — you’d think I’d have noticed

Shock. Horror. Gasp. Kent Hovind tells a lie about me.

By the way, I agree that I look pretty shabby today. I dyed my beard a month ago, and of course it’s coming in gray again, and I don’t feel like dying it again. I’m also shellacked by the booster shot I got on Thursday…getting better, but still horribly achey. I’ve also been wearing a stupid boot to recover from tendinitis, and yeah, I’m tired. You are allowed to call me old and ugly. But at least I’m not a lying moron like Kent.

I had to get this video out fast

I have opinions on this silly University of Austin/UATX nonsense, but I fear the nascent institution is about to become an ex-institution, because its official supporters are rushing to distance themselves from it all. So, before my words become totally obsolete, I put up a video stating my piece.

A year from now, this is going to be a curious artifact of yet another goofy right-wing reach for the straws, and people won’t even remember what UATX was.

Transcript below the fold.

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Every time this guy opens his mouth, he proves how wrong I can be

Once upon a time, I thought David Silverman was a good guy — a bit aggressive, maybe, with a few weird ideas, but heck, he was going on Fox News to fight the good fight, and he proudly declared himself a feminist. Then he got caught coercing sex from young women, was fired, and now…

I look at him now and wonder how bad a judge of character am I? How did I miss the warning signs? He’s an object lesson in how vulnerable we all are to believing what we want to believe.

By the way, on just the objective facts of the case, Rittenhouse is a gun freak who traveled out-of-state to drop in on a protest and murder a couple of people with a high-powered rifle. He is a murderer. He killed with intent. He’s also probably going to walk because our justice system is a joke, and he got a lunatic as a judge.

Here I am living in The Future, and some of it is such a let-down

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.

This is what happens when you abandon a consensus

Suddenly, we have “universities” claiming to be the only ones in pursuit of the truth.

Then…THE DEEP RIFTS. Oh, this is delicious. The phrenologists and the anti-vaxxers are battling it out on Twitter.

There’s more.

Screw all those guys, every one of them.

Noooooo! Curse you, algorithm!

I made the mistake of reading this article about some minor celebrity, Demi Lovato, endorsing some weird video channel, Gaia. Look at this: it’s perfect skeptic bait.

On a Lovato-themed Gaia page for their fans, the singer’s supporters can view a free episode of a Gaia show about an “ancient space program” before signing up for a $11.99 monthly Gaia membership.

Lovato’s “handpicked favorite” shows, according to the website, include a series positing that Atlantis was real and that humanity is living in the aftermath of a battle between giants and lizard-like “reptilians.”

A representative for Lovato declined to comment on the record. Gaia didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While the claims made in the videos produced by Gaia can seem laughable, the site, which claims to have more than 750,000 members, has become a clearinghouse pushing conspiracy theories into the New Age movement. Gaia’s videos are slickly produced to look like genuine documentaries, with some featuring prominent figures in the anti-vaccine movement. The site has also been called a “hub for QAnon,” with QAnon promoters flocking to the platform after facing crackdowns from other websites.

Then I doubled my mistake. I had to look up this Gaia thing (warning: you might not want click on the link yourself, it’s cursed). It’s an overpriced subscription service for really bad fake “documentaries”. It left me wondering how these incompetent clowns get so much attention for such wacky beliefs?

I know of some of them. They’re total idiots.

But now the curse of the internet algorithm — Gaia must be pumping lots of money into their ad promotion, because now I get tons of pseudoscience ads. I can’t watch YouTube without getting wall-to-wall ads about Atlantis and the Annanuki and Bigfoot and Q. It’s annoying. In for a penny, in for a pound, so I watched a bit of this one. Don’t do it unless you’re a committed masochist!

This young man calmly asserts that he was born in Atlantis to the descendants of the Annanuki.

Now I am doomed. It’s going to be even more continuous foolishness than usual for me on the interwebs. Heed my warning!

The Freezer of the Damned

Uh-oh. Apparently, I’ve been storing Satan in my freezer.

Conservative cable network Newsmax has sidelined White House correspondent Emerald Robinson after she made the utterly bonkers claim that COVID-19 vaccines contain a “bioluminescent” tracker linked to the Devil.

In a post that has since been taken down by Twitter for peddling COVID-19 misinformation, Robinson warned “Christians” that the vaccines include “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” all while suggesting to her followers that the shot was the “Mark of the Beast”—something she’s said before.

What do you know…someone who is just too batty for Newsmax.

A little more information:

  • There is no luciferase in the vaccines. That would be silly and pointless, since no, you can’t use it to track people.

  • Luciferase is an enzyme that reacts with a couple of common substrates to make light. If you want to make cells glow, you inject them with it, or in many cases you insert the luciferase DNA into the genome, and you get a cell that produces light, which is handy…if you are tracking its expression in a microscope.

  • I’ve also got some Lucifer Yellow in my freezer. This is not an enzyme — the compound actually glows bright yellow under fluorescent light. Likewise, I’ve used it for looking at cells, not people.

  • Do you even know how much this stuff costs? Last time I bought it, LY was about $600 for a vial containing 100mg. You’re not going to throw it into a dose of vaccines.

I have several other dyes in my freezer. 1,1′-Dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′-Tetramethylindocarbocyanine Perchlorate (DiI, for short) is a favorite, but who knows, it might be the name of some other Lord of Hell.