This exists

You can buy it as a Christmas gift! It’s only $70!

There are other versions. There are a whole lot of these things!

In case you’re wondering what it is, it’s a small Faraday cage for people who are sensitive (they think) to EMF radiation. These are designed for you to place your WiFi router in so that it will stop hosing your house with 2.4-5 gigaherz radiation. Which is the whole point of a WiFi router. So yeah, you go drop $100 on a router so you can browse the internet, and then cage it up in a metal box so you can’t browse the internet. Brilliant!

Another amazing thing: those cages have a significant number of 5-star reviews. I guess they work!

Uh-oh, the young’uns are noticing our incompetence

I guess one of the dangers of teaching a class in critical thinking is that students might lose respect for us old people.

But students have grown annoyed.

“They were uniformly outraged,” Smith says, “because people are investing time and energy into this instead of doing things like stopping the spread of coronavirus or putting in place policies to counter global warming.”

Most are in their late teens and early twenties, having grown up as digital natives.

“They believe they have better skills to fact-check,” he says, citing anecdotes — admittedly not ideal for a science class, but there hasn’t been enough polling, yet, for good data — about middle-aged women falling for QAnon’s co-opted “save the children” slogan. One student’s mother had fallen for it.

While it’s heartening that his students can see what’s going on, Smith is concerned about what it all means for the rest of us.

History is going to remember us boomers as the generation that was so stupid that they fell for that QAnon bullshit. Someday you might be dandling a grandchild on your knee and they’re going to ask what side you were on in the Idiot Wars, and you better have a good and honest answer.

Bad professor

It’s always sad to see someone bring disgrace to my profession. There’s a physical science professor, Thomas Brennan at Ferris State University in Michigan, who went on a surprising rant. He raged about an elite Jewish conspiracy, that the coronavirus is caused by nanotechnology in cell phones, Covid19 is another jewish revolution, that the moon landings were fake, that atom bombs are fake, that the pandemic lockdown is a conspiracy by the Leftist new world over to take over, etc., etc., etc. He has since been placed on leave, although one has to wonder how long this guy was in place on campus, with the other faculty in his discipline looking on. They had to have known!

He was a full-on racist, anti-Semitic, far-right kook with an account on gab and ludicrously awful views about science.

But, you say, what about his side of the story? Maybe he’s got really good, rational arguments to support his views, and would be able to martial an excellent defense in a debate. I got news for you: Brennan wrote a formal letter explaining his position. It really doesn’t help him at all.

This controversy started after I made a few statements in a College of Arts and Sciences
meeting of faculty and staff about the Covid-19 pandemic. My statements were to the
effect that I believe the Covid-19 pandemic is a stunt designed to enslave
humanity and strip us of all of our rights and freedoms.
I don’t believe that the pandemic is a hoax, people have died. But its severity is being
exaggerated by revolutionary leftists in the media and government who ‘never let a good
crisis go to waste.’ The end result of this hysteria, if unchecked, will be a mandatory
vaccine. No one will be allowed into public places or permitted to buy food in a
supermarket unless they present proof-of-vaccination. Initially, this electronic vaccination
certificate will be tied to a person’s smartphone, but will soon after be in the form of
injectable micro or nanotechnology in the vaccine itself. If this comes about it will truly
be a fulfillment of the prophecy of the mark of the beast, as described by St. John the
Apostle in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13:16-17.

See? Perfectly rational. Bible prophecies are always solid evidence.

Let me address a few of these tweets, starting with the one where I used the ’n-word.’ I
believe the ’n-word’ is a mind-control spell designed to make us hate each
other. I am not racist against black people, I love and respect them. But I
reject the premise that there are certain magic words that should never be used in any
context or by certain people. I uttered the word to try to neutralize its power, and
its implied meaning in the context of the tweet was as a synonym for ‘human being,’ or
‘person,’ since I used it to describe people of different races. I deleted this tweet within a
few hours of typing it back in June 2019, way before I made the Covid-19 comment, so
someone must have screen-shotted it and been building a portfolio to use against me for
when the time came.

It’s all a conspiracy! They’re out to get me!

Ironically, my casual use of the ’n-word’ in that tweet isn’t the most controversial thing
about it. It’s that I’m calling out the huge scientific and historical frauds that I believe
have been perpetrated since the mid-twentieth century. There is real science, but there is
also fake science. Fake science is an instrument of oppression. I believe that Bill Nye,
Buzz Aldrin, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Anthony Fauci are human beings of worth, as we
all are, but I believe they are telling some lies and are a part of a system of lies.

They’re all liars! It’s all fake science!

Besides using the ’n-word,’ a linguistic atom-bomb that I only used to get people’s
attention, I also said ‘Atom Bombs are Fake.’ The atom bomb has got to be one of
the most fear-inducing, oppressive ideas of all time, and ‘fear is the mind-killer.’ After rewatching the footage of atomic bomb tests from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it appears to me
they are just films of explosions of large piles of TNT, made to look much bigger through
special effects. By filming an explosion at a high frame-rate and playing it back in slow motion, an impression of immensity can be achieved. Other special-effects techniques
such as ‘front projection,’ ‘forced perspective,’ and superimposed images also seem to
have been used in some of the footage. A combination of these techniques was used to
produce the surprisingly real-looking tornado scene in the 1939 film, the Wizard of Oz.
The best special effects were then, and are still, a military secret, and were only used
sparingly in fictional films of the time to define a false frame of what was real on film.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fire-bombed and flattened overnight with conventional
bombs.
There is much more to the atom bomb deception, but let me move on. I also said: “the
Moon landings are fake.” The films of the Apollo moon landings were faked using
the same special effects bag of tricks that was used to fake the bomb. But the most
powerful argument for why I believe we did not land on the Moon is that the inner solar
system is a blast furnace, and the sun-lit surface of the Moon is over 700 F, not 250 F, as
NASA claims. That is why the Moon glows red during a lunar eclipse—not because of
refracted red light from the Earth’s atmosphere, as Bill Nye and Neil Tyson would have
you believe. The shadow of the Earth’s atmosphere is blue, not red.

He taught physics, let me remind you.

The entire world has fallen under the spell of a satanic, globalist elite. Their end-goal is a
technocratic, one-world government, where everyone, Jew and Gentile, will be
microchipped and tracked 24/7. They use the rhetoric of social-justice and cancel culture, not to bring about equality, but to smear and silence anyone who opposes them.
We will all be equally enslaved if they have their way. They use science, both fake and
real, as a weapon to control us and keep us in a constant state of fear. The fear-spell of
the atom bomb has worn off after all of these years, so they had to unleash a new one,
Covid-19. Lord have mercy on me and on us all.

His intentions are noble and pure, you see.

Don’t you worry about Professor Brennan. He may be about to be fired so hard he’s going to fly out of his socks, but he has a lucrative future ahead of him as a speaker at QAnon rallies and anti-vaxxer conferences, and he’ll probably be invited onto the Joe Rogan show any moment now.

Funny-looking rocks are not fossils

Anyone remember Ed Conrad? I had a few encounters with him years and years ago. Now I found someone worse, a guy named Roger Spurr who runs a YouTube channel called “Mudfossil University”. It’s about as much a university as PragerU; it’s a dorkwad with stupid ideas promoting them without any critical evaluation, and what he believes is that natural rock formations and caves are actually the fossilized remains of giants. So I had to make a video about him.

Scriptish sort of thing below the fold.

[Read more…]

Creepy bobblehead farms gullible flock

How can normal human beings fall for Kenneth Copeland’s schtick? But they do,and this ranting twit makes millions of dollars, and sheesh, watch his audience clutch their baldspots.

Somebody make a video of Copeland “curing” impotence, or hemorrhoids.

Dr Pangloss lives, and she is a creationist

I am speechless.

…we can look at the nasal bones right here. God designed humans very specifically with this nasal bone, because he knew because of sin we’d be wearing glasses and contacts, right, so this helps hold our glasses. Primates have no need to wear glasses, so they were not created with that bone there. Right? Distinct difference. And that’s how easy it is to look at a fossil and know right away whether it is a primate or whether it is a human.

That’s from Answers in Genesis, just today.

And yet she liked him

Rebecca Watson weighs in on The Amazing Randi’s complicated legacy. Randi was probably the most charming human being I’ve ever met, and like Rebecca, I always enjoyed our moments together, but…

Perhaps it was that stubborn disbelief that led to our eventual falling-out nearly a decade ago. As one of the more prominent female skeptics, I began campaigning for the male majority in the movement to be more accepting of (or to at least to stop randomly groping and awkwardly propositioning) women. Many men pushed back, sending me rape and death threats. When a man announced on Twitter a few days prior to 2011’s TAM that he planned to “cop a feel” if he saw me, Randi refused to even bar the man from attending. I felt like it was too late to drop out, so I attended and felt awful the entire time. I didn’t go anywhere alone. It was the last time I spoke at TAM.

Privately, Randi apparently complained to mutual friends about me pushing feminism, trying to change the culture of the movement that he had fostered for the past few decades. He thought that by asking skeptics to be better, I was making the movement look worse. I suppose I was, and in the years that followed the attendance at his conference dropped and Randi’s organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation, officially blamed me for scaring women away. Randi retired from JREF later, and though there were people involved who wanted it to go on as a charitable organization, it quietly disappeared.

It also didn’t help that some (not all!) of the people Randi routinely promoted and featured in his conferences were so awful that they drove me away. Being a sexist asshole was never an obstacle to being welcomed to Randi’s big tent. Sadly, that diminished his long-term impact.

The Grand Prize for Pseudoscientific Gobbledygook goes to…the University of Pittsburgh!

This is an amazingly demented paper, titled Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis. It’s such a tangle of random inferences and wild-ass leaps, all built on a foundation of disbelief in the germ theory of medicine. And it goes on and on! Just the abstract is nuts enough!

Thoracic organs, namely, the lungs and kidneys in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-associated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), exhibit silicate/glass-like (hyaline) and iron oxides-like deposits, which are like serpentinization-induced minerals. The discovery of the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect suggests that a resonant external magnetic field could alter the spin state of electrons in biogenic molecules and result in the magnetic catalysis of aberrant molecules and disease. We propose here that carbon dioxide-rich water-peridotite (a ferromagnesian silicate) interactions generate abnormal lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies (LWMAs) via serpentinization, during conditions with increased terrestrial water storage and atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a weakened geomagnetic field. Furthermore, we provide evidence supporting a hypothesis, which posits, COVID-19 is a pathologic manifestation of resonant LWMAs-induced magnetic catalysis of iron oxides-silicate-like minerals from biogenic molecules and the coronavirus from endogenous viral elements, with the virus particles capable of replication and transmission to other hosts. We propose that those LWMAs are associated with the production of iron oxides-silicate rock minerals in tectonic plates with Proterozoic cratons. Thus, severe COVID-19 outbreaks are/will predominately occur in Eurasia and the Americas and are governed by the spatiotemporal dynamics of terrestrial water storage and the semiannual oscillation of the weakening geomagnetic magnetic field. We propose that the ferromagnetic-like iron stores in humans are the unifying determinant for COVID-19-induced morbidity and mortality. Furthermore, we propose that Nephrite-Jade amulets (a calcium-ferromagnesian silicate) developed by Neolithic Chinese Medicine to prevent thoracic organ disease, may prevent COVID-19.

I read the whole paper by Moses Turkle Bility. It was a wild ride. Let me try to summarize the whole thing in non-gibberish.

  • They had two rooms full of immunocompromised experimental rats.
  • These rats had been surgically implanted with fetal human hematopoietic tissue for reasons unknown, but for an experiment that had been approved by the university.
  • A respiratory disease swept through the colony, affecting one room more than the other. Nothing is made of this observation.
  • COVID-19 is a respiratory disease. Therefore they called this a COVID-19-like disease. Gotta cash in on the hot topics, you know!
  • They dissected the dead rats and found hemorrhagic patches and silicate/glass-like structures in their lungs. These are not clearly evident in the photos, but OK…
  • Silicate/glass-like structures? Surely, this means the phenomenon is similar to the phenomenon of serpentization in geology! (I’m wobbly on what serpentization is, but here’s a short definition.)
  • Therefore, we must immediately delve deep into geological processes and oscillations in planetary electromagnetic fields. Ta da!

  • We assume Long-Wavelength Magnetic Anomalies Induces COVID-19 Via Magnetic Catalysis, not that silly germ theory or zoonotic infection by a zoonotically-derived virus. I guess we know what causes COVID-19 now, and it isn’t a virus.
  • Nephrite-Jade Amulets Interacts With LWMAs (long-wavelength magnetic anomalies) and prevents disease in thoracic organs. I guess we know what cures COVID-19 now.
  • There was no test of the effect of LWMAs on the rats. They also didn’t make itty-bitty jade amulets for them.

That’s all remarkable bullshit presented in a kind of rabid stream-of-consciousness form, with the major conclusions neither tested nor even logically implied by the circumstances that triggered the “study”. It was not so much a “study” as some guy’s rat lab being devastated by a disease, so he retreats to his office to make a lengthy rationalization based on Traditional Chinese Medicine and half-assed geology. No experiments were done, yet he leaps to all these bizarre conclusions. Just look at the diagram above, most of which is irrelevant noise stitched together with unjustified premises!

There is nothing in Bility’s CV to suggest anything but a background in competently executed biomedical research. He’s an untenured assistant professor, though. This is the kind of paper that, if presented to the tenure committee, would instantly call his stability and his ability to do good science into question. Poor guy.

Also, that Elsevier would publish such an idiotic, science-deny paper would question their competence as a publisher if we didn’t already know that Elsevier was an evil, corrupt company.

Uh-oh. This wasn’t a one-off weirdness. Bility has also published Stonehenge as a public health intervention device for preventing lithospheric magnetic field-induced emerging diseases and megadeath during periods of severely weakened geomagnetic field. Way to scuttle a career, guy!