“medbeds”

Watch this video. Are you fooled? Does this look at all convincing to you?

It’s not even a good AI video. On technical merits alone, it’s crap; but it’s also touting a non-existent medical technology that it doesn’t bother to explain how these “medbeds” would work. It was promoted by the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, making it merely the latest in a long string of cringe.

In reality, the video, first flagged by Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan, did not air on “My View with Lara Trump,” as it claimed, or any other Fox News show. These so-called med beds do not exist. Yet many QAnon devotees insist the non-existent technology secretly keeps John F. Kennedy Jr. alive. As investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet has discovered, the earliest mention of the video’s claim comes from a now-deleted Instagram page that “uses a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.” By sharing the AI footage of himself, Trump is giving his MAGA followers false hope that he will soon grant them access to the elites’ magic product. The video was eventually deleted from Trump’s account on Sunday morning — but not before it gained traction online.

Trump defenders, as they are often wont to do, rushed to laugh off the incident as a harmless joke. But a quick social media search reveals that a lot of people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away with cancer and other illnesses really believed it. QAnon-type spaces were excited at the possibility that Trump would finally release all the hidden cures. Many MAGA believers have refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes. This is both depraved and heartbreaking.

How would crawling into a bed with a plastic bubble over it improve the quality of your health care? I don’t know. They don’t know. This is pure cope: the people who are busily dismantling the functionality of conventional health care are trying to compensate by inventing fantasy magical technology to replace it.

This is not a real thing.

It must hurt when he ejaculates

Wow. There are actually people who still believe in spermism, to an even more extreme than Pythagoras?

Actually he was in your husbands balls you just carry the home he needs to grow in
“eggs develop in a female fetus during pregnancy. So while she was in her mother’s womb, she grew fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus.”
No shit. The point is the actual BABY was in your partners balls. You carry the tools to hold the baby for it to grow and develop but that baby itself was never part of you. It’s home, the egg it grew from yes but what actually creates the baby no women don’t got that power.

In case you were unfamiliar with historical embryology, this was spermism.

As most of the ancient Greek thinkers were, Pythagoras was half scientist and half mystic, and for the longest time his theory on inheritance prevailed. Pythagoras’s theory attempted to explain the mechanisms between the physical similarity, or “likeness,” of parents and their offspring. At the heart of his theory lay his suggestion that hereditary information was carried predominantly in male sperm. This hereditary information was gathered by the sperm circulating throughout the body and absorbing metaphysical information from its environment (arms, legs, heart, etc.). Since this theory focused mainly around the sperm, it became known as spermism. This information-infused unit matured in the womb whose main objective, according to Pythagoras, was to provide nutrients for this raw data to be transformed into a child. The focus around the male as the primary source of hereditary information had far-reaching effects in society, with civilizations viewing women as nothing more than “human incubators,” and men being considered the forebearer of all children.

Spermism was effectively replaced by Aristotle’s view that both male and female carried hereditary information, so he’s only 2500 years behind on his homework. Nobody is arguing that there is a whole flotilla of complete babies swimming in semen, which would make every ejaculation a horrific mass murder of between 10 and 200 million babies. This ignorant guy probably considers himself “pro-life” while picturing every sexual encounter (or masturbation) as a horrific slaughter of “babies”.

It’s Tylenol?

RFK jr claimed over a month ago that this month they were going to find and announce the cause of autism. We all knew he was full of shit — he’s permanently full to the eyebrows with shit — and that this was a political game they were playing, because autism is a multifactorial syndrome with multiple enabling factors, and you’re not going to find a ‘magic bullet’ for it. Well, yesterday the gang of frauds and liars in the White House announced that there was a central link, and that it was acetaminophen, or Tylenol. This is like announcing that the cause is consuming bread — something with a widespread, long-term use that a huge number of pregnant women had eaten. Mothers with autistic children will now think that using a common, well-tested pain reliever is the cause, and blame themselves.

Trump gathered his crack team of worthless quacks to make this announcement.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. (I don’t know who the woman is, I guess no one thinks she’s important enough to name)

Of course Trump tried to take credit for this “discovery”.

It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby, Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the forefront of American politics, along with me. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism.

We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, Trump said.

Oh god. All the gullible people who believed him about ivermectin are now going to be telling pregnant women that they just have to suffer through headaches and fevers, all because a group of elected and appointed clowns say so. They presented no evidence for a link between autism and Tylenol, but just blithely charged in and invented one. The studies have been done to show that Tylenol is not a significant factor! Here’s one that looked at 2,480,797 children and found no connection.

Study reveals no causal link between neurodevelopmental disorders and acetaminophen exposure before birth
NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Scientists compared siblings — who share genetics and other variables such as parental health, environmental exposures, and socioeconomic factors — and were able to limit the influence of other potential risk factors. This allowed them to focus specifically on, and eliminate, the risk associated with acetaminophen. The study design was unique due to the size of the population captured in the Swedish Medical Birth Register and the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Before siblings were considered, there appeared to be a small increase in risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in children exposed to acetaminophen, which was noted in previous studies.

Acetaminophen is commonly used as a pain reliever and fever reducer and is found in a variety of medicines available over the counter and via prescription. It is often taken during pregnancy instead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, which can cause low levels of amniotic fluid, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The reasons pregnant people might take acetaminophen, including fever, or conditions such as chronic migraine, could be, and in some cases are, associated with an increased risk for later neurodevelopmental disorders following pregnancy.

One limitation of this study is that it relies on data from prescribed acetaminophen and from self-reporting from pregnant people during prenatal care. It may not capture all use or dosage in all people, particularly over-the-counter medicines. However, the number of patients included in the study sample and the ability to control for many other confounding factors support the conclusion that acetaminophen is not directly linked to an increase link of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

To inform best preventative strategies, additional research is required to fully understand the genetic and non-genetic factors that increase the risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

The effect is simply not there! Because Trump has surrounded himself with incompetent frauds, this claim is going to resonate through society and have multiple deleterious effects on American health. Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and RFK jr belong on a list of infamous quacks alongside disgraced “doctor” Andrew Wakefield.

Avi Loeb loses a soccer match

Tragic. Avi Loeb lost the annual soccer match at his institution!

Last night, we held the annual soccer cup match between the faculty and the students at Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Computation, for which I serve as director. Although I scored 2 goals for the faculty team, the students won 3 to 2. Disappointed by the outcome, I focused on 3I/ATLAS as soon as I woke up the following morning.

On the bright side, it gave him an excuse to remind everyone that he was the director, and to mention that he scored the only two goals on his side. Apparently, no one has told him that these kinds of games are just for fun, that it’s bad taste to focus on the score, and that no one else was trying to “win”. He was disconsolate at “losing,” though, and when he woke up the next morning he decided to cheer himself up by contorting some data to make it fit his idea that 3I/ATLAS was a nuclear-powered starship.

He does a lot of math, and determines that

IF 3I/ATLAS is much smaller than the estimates
THEN it must have an internal light source to get the brightness we observe

Rather than considering that his initial premise could be wrong, he invents some other hypothetical mechanisms.

I first calculated that a primordial black hole with a Hawking temperature of 1,000 degrees Kelvin would produce only 20 nanowatts of power, clearly insufficient to power 3I/ATLAS. A natural nuclear source could be a rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material. This possibility is highly unlikely, given the scarce reservoir of radioactive elements in interstellar space.

Wait…why assume an interstellar rock needs a certain amount of power? Never mind, those were explanations he threw out and discarded so we would favor his preferred hypothesis.

Alternatively, 3I/ATLAS could be a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel. This cannot be ruled out, but requires better evidence to be viable.

Then he nicely asked NASA to redirect their instruments near Mars and Jupiter to focus on his hypothetical nuclear powered spacecraft. And also contacted the NY Post to write about his sensational discovery.

The man is such a ridiculous glory-hog.

Loon sighting confirmed!

I told you that Brian Lauer is an ignorant buffoon, but you shouldn’t trust my opinion alone. Last night, Mark Reid and Dr. Dan worked over the same presentation and came to the same conclusion, so it’s official: Lauer is a kook.

But perhaps you are cautiously skeptical. You need more evidence. You want direct evidence from Lauer himself. Here’s the introduction to a podcast on Real Science Radio (it’s not real science) which is just conspiracy theories stacked on conspiracy theories.

RSR host Fred Williams is joined by Brian Lauer to unravel the World Economic Forum’s “The Great Reset”, a consortium of wealthy and powerful evolutionists looking to use the pandemic as an excuse to push their worldview. On the surface, it’s just another socialist economic plan in a similar vein to FDR’s disastrous New Deal and LBJ’s failed Great Society, but this time it’s driven by the flawed science of materialism and climate change. Like its predecessors, the underlying false assumptions will end up hurting the economy and tearing away at the middle class, further dividing society and fueling class warfare. “The Great Reset” globalists have posted 8 predictions of what the world will look like in 2030 if governments buy into their short-sighted ideas. Better stock up on T-bones now!

But even more sinister are a litany of ideas hidden in the subterfuge of “The Great Reset”, such as biometric surveillance and transhumanism. A key advisor to “The Great Reset” is Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While he warns that transhumanism can be pushed too far, such as digital dictatorships with total control over their population, his false worldview steeped in the fake science of materialism leads him to the silly belief that humans are “hackable animals” that can have their total consciousness manipulated such that “free will is over”. For more, check out this brief video Brian found and hear it for yourself! You can also hear more from his talk at a recent creation conference.

I choked and passed out at wealthy and powerful evolutionists, so the rest was just noise.

Reid v Lauer…again!

Brian Lauer of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association debated Mark Reid on the topic of creation vs. evolution and Reid slapped him down hard. I came on for a second round and tore up Lauer’s arguments further. Now there’s blood in the water: Mark Reid is coming back to mutilate the corpse yet further on Wednesday evening.

This should be fun. I’ll be watching and making comments in the chat. Join in! Maybe Lauer will show up to defend himself, adding to the hilarity.

Bad apples identified

If you follow RetractionWatch, you know that there a lot of bad papers published in the scientific literature. But there you just see the steady drip, drip, drip of bad research getting exposed, a paper at a time. If you step back and look at the overall picture, you begin to see the source. A lot of it comes from paper mills and bad actors conspiring to allow their pals to publish trash.

(PubPeer is a site that allows post-publication peer review and catches many examples of bad science.)

Nature jumped on an analysis of the people behind swarms of retracted papers on PLoS One, and exposed some of the editors. The problem can be pinned on a surprisingly small number of researchers/editors.

Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted.

The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July.

Wow. These are people who betrayed the responsibilities of a professional scientist. They need to be exposed and rooted out…but they also reflect a systemic issue.

The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots.

Yeah, it’s all about money. And also about the use of publications for professional advancement.

So, about the individuals who are committing these perfidious activities…Nature identified many, but I’ll just single out one as an example.

In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests.

Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices.

That’s a batting record that ought to discredit all of Farooq’s work, and ought to taint all of his coauthors and the researchers who had their work “reviewed” by him. Fortunately for all of us, he has lost all of his editorial duties.

Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology. My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers, he added.

That’s a remarkable excuse: he got caught, so it’s all the publishers’ fault.

Purging a few bad apples isn’t going to fix the issues, because the problem is only getting worse.

In the PNAS paper, Richardson and his colleagues compiled a list of 32,786 papers that they and other sleuths flagged for bearing hallmarks of paper-mill production, such as duplicated images, tortured phrases and whole copied sentences. Only 8,589 of these papers have been retracted. They report that the number of suspected paper-mill articles is doubling every 1.5 years — outpacing the number of retractions, which is doubling every 3.3 years.

Hey, you know, this is where AI could be really useful — I think a lot of these fraudsters are using AI to generate the AI-slop papers, but we could turn it around and use AI to detect the conspiratorial web of collaborating authors as well as the bad writing in these papers.

The arrogance of creationists is but a speck in the face of reality

This is a photo of the gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy.

The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.

Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Meanwhile, here on the Planet of the Dumbasses, in a country renowned for its dumbassery, a dumbass religious fanatic has convened a conference featuring three dumbass astronaut-apologists to argue that the entire universe is only 6000 years old, and that only the Planet of Dumbasses is populated by dumbasses who are able to look up into the sky and appreciate astronomy. You can read a long and thorough review of this dumbass conference, but the comment that jumped out a me was this one:

Ham went on to discuss the cosmos, naming various constellations and nebulae and demonstrating his familiarity with astronomy. He explained his belief that God had created the universe to showcase His power to human beings; as Psalm 19 says, The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. The universe, Ham claimed, has no other purpose than to impress us here on Earth with God’s capacity for creation.

So, apparently, a god assembled this gigantic black hole, 36 billion solar masses in size, unobservable until now, in 2025, just to show off. You’d think he could have done a better job of this one planet full of his dumbass worshippers with all the energy and power he used to construct an impossibly distant sphere of death, that we can’t visit and most of us can’t even see. However, the narcissism of this Christian god is far greater than 36 billion stars, I guess, which is why we’re supposed to worship his bloated ego.

To treat science as merely one belief system among many is to misrepresent what science is and why it matters. Claims that science is merely a tool to promote a certain political perspective (whether accusing climate researchers of fabrication or reducing medical research to “Big Pharma” profiteering) are rhetorically powerful because they reframe empirical findings as mere opinion. But while no human endeavor is untouched by ideology, the strength of science lies precisely in its effort to weed ideology out. NASA’s science missions must be protected, not despite the fact that their findings may challenge deeply held beliefs or even particular political goals, but precisely because they do. In an era when the authority of evidence is often undermined or dismissed, defending the integrity of empirical discovery is essential – not only for the future of space science, but for the very idea that reality can be investigated and understood without fear of the consequences of challenging dogma, whether religious or political.

The reviewer is too nice to say it, but I’m not nice. Fuck Charlie Duke. Fuck Jeffrey N. Williams. Fuck Barry “Butch” Wilmore. They are people who have betrayed truth for a religious lie.