When life gives you a pandemic, make lemonade

I’ve lost of all the quack remedies for COVID that have been invented by grifters: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bleach, betadine, etc. Here’s one we could have predicted — urine. There’s a weird fringe of urine-drinkers who have been around for a long time, so it’s unsurprising they were ready to leap into the fray.

Anti-COVID-19 “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key has a new quarter-baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19: Drink their own urine. “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need,” Key said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over a trespassing charge. “This has been around for centuries,” he added. “When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt,” the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is “cray cray.” “Now drink urine!” he continued. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” he concluded. “I drink my own urine!” Reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Sunday night, Key doubled down on what he calls “urine therapy” and railed against “foolish” people who took the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective.

Oh, you think that’s awful? Here’s something worse.

Never take a popsicle or a glass of lemonade from a stranger, and don’t let your kids take drinks from their weird friends.

The Institute for Creation research has a new logo!

Good work, design team!

After 52 years of fruitful ministry, the Institute for Creation Research is renewing its commitment to rigorous scientific research that affirms the truth of Scripture. As a staff, we’re delighted to reveal a new logo that reflects our mission and highlights an exciting field of research.

It certainly does reflect their mission and their rigorous scientific research.

They’ve got it backwards. That’s a left-handed spiral, DNA has a right-handed spiral.

Kudos!

(This is a fairly common mistake in commercial art, but it’s a bit incongruous in an organization that’s bragging about their scientific rigor.)*

*(Which they lack, anyway.)

Darth Sweater

My last video was edited in such a way that you could only see hints of what I was wearing, and some people were curious. It’s winter, so I was wearing a sweater, and it’s the holiday season, so of course it was a Christmas sweater, and I’m an atheist, so I don’t worship Jesus, so instead it celebrates my Lord and Savior, Darth Vader.

I know you’re envious and want one of your own, but don’t ask me where I got it, I forget.

Don’t try to tell me creationism isn’t a science stopper

Oh boy, Answers in Genesis has published their assessment of the James Webb Space Telescope. They’ve already decided that it’ll be great for taking pretty pictures of stars, which they’ll no doubt use to illustrate their beliefs, but it’s bad, fallacious science. It’s secular, naturalistic, and saturated with evolutionary thinking!

So obviously, there are some awesome observational science aspects (observable, testable, repeatable) to this mission, such as observing and studying the farthest regions of the visible universe that were previously hidden to us. However, as seen from the many news reports published by the media (especially from NASA), the overall objectives for JWST are saturated in evolutionary (and really naturalistic) thinking. For example, NASA states on one of their websites, “The primary goals of Webb are to study galaxy, star and planet formation in the universe. To see the very first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe, we have to look deep into space to look back in time (because it takes light time to travel from there to here, the farther out we look, the further we look back in time).”

You must understand the binary distinction that AiG makes about science. Good science is “observational” science: the work that just describes what you see right now, that doesn’t draw any inferences about cause and effect, past or future. It’s fixed and static. That leaf is green. That rock weighs 80 kilograms. The temperature right now is -24°C.

Bad science they lump into a category called “historical” science, because, as we all know, historians don’t draw any conclusions from the past, don’t make inferences about causes, don’t see any kind of links between historical events, ever. It’s all lists of dates and battles and kings, you know, kind of like what you see in the book of Genesis, which is good “observational” science. All that stuff about hypothesis testing, and induction, and experiment, and theory, and interpreting and predicting connections between events, the tools that scientists have relied on and found productive since at least the days of Francis Bacon…well, that’s just bad, with only occasional exceptions.

Note, these objectives fall into the category of science that’s called historical science (making assumptions about the past based on evidence in the present), which, by the way, can be useful in certain applications (like in forensic science when analyzing crime-scene evidence) but only when used through a biblical “lens” and logical worldview.

OK, so you’re allowed to use historical science, but only to solve murders. And all murders must be viewed through a biblical “lens”! I think that means they’re all committed by witches.

In case my sarcasm is obscuring this fact, no, these distinctions that AiG makes between observational and historical science are total bullshit. They make this bogus dichotomy all the time — it’s practically the first thing they tell you in the entranceway to their Creation “Museum” — but all it really is is a way for them to throw out otherwise totally unremarkable scientific ideas that they find objectionable because they reveal that their interpretation of the Bible is false. They don’t like that we can look at the universe and see that reality contradicts their biblical version of events.

Therefore, the JWST is a priori wicked and false.

However, in this instance, these statements for the JWST are clearly secular (and unbiblical), which inevitably means they’re also fallacious (this is the result of every unbiblical worldview). Notice the claim of “looking” back in time (when looking at objects deep in space) in order to see how everything in the universe began through cosmological evolution (i.e., the big bang). But note that when making this claim, they’ve already merely assumed cosmological evolution (by assuming star/planet formation occurred in the early stages of galaxies) in order to prove cosmological evolution (via “looking” back in time). This is a logical fallacy called begging the question.

Wrong. Science builds on prior observation and experiment to build models of how the world works, which are then continuously tested with further observation and experiment. The space telescope is built on a body of science and technology, driven by the fact that there are things we can’t observe now with existing technology. It was lofted into orbit to see phenomena that we were unable to see before, and that’s the entire point: if we could just assume that we already have all the answers, then there would be no need to spend $10 billion to make a better telescope. Astronomers will use this tool to test their predictions about what lies out there.

It may generate new theories, or it might provide further confirmation of cosmological evolution. That’s what the creationists actually fear, that this OBSERVATIONAL science will provide even more information showing that their HISTORICAL interpretation of biblical history is petty and silly, and that the “science” in their book of Genesis is nonexistent or false.

Uncle Keith has been very busy

James O’Brien always says what makes sense.

Sometimes, though, I think the government is run by a bunch of bumbling Uncle Keiths who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t ever look at the evidence. For instance, here’s what the omicron variant is doing right now:

Deaths are down from last year, which is very good — we’ve got a better fortified population of people who have been vaccinated. This disease is still raging, though, which makes this decision by the St Paul school district incomprehensible to me.

Just as coronavirus cases are surging after winter break, St. Paul Public Schools is considering no longer identifying and excluding unvaccinated students who come into contact with an infected person at school.

Contact tracing is taxing school health personnel, and extended quarantines are hard on families, said Mary Langworthy, the district’s health and wellness director. She said many students have had to stay home for 10 days on three different occasions.

“Our parents are struggling to get to their jobs, they don’t have daycare options. … That’s a hardship for many of our families to endure,” she told the school board this week.

That is quite the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard from someone who’s supposed to be sensible and reasonable. We’re seeing many students being exposed to COVID, so our solution is…to close our eyes and stop testing, so we don’t see them anymore.

I know what a hardship it is to have your rigidly scheduled work life disrupted by natural causes, we used to have kids in our home. Somehow, though, the American solution is to pretend the problems of health and illness don’t exist, because work must carry on as if no pandemic existed. We can’t possibly decide that work must compromise and develop a greater flexibility to accommodate the needs of the people in this time of stress. Oh no, you have sick children at home? But how will these widgets get made? How will luncheon be served to those wealthy matrons? How will these boxes of Amazon goods get next-day delivery, and how will Jeff Bezos be able to afford a new rocket? Your priorities are maladjusted and out of alignment with American values! There are bosses and landlords whose pockets must be filled!

While we don’t have kids at home anymore, if my wife got sick, my number one priority would be helping her, and my job would have to work around that fact. If I got sick, my next goal would be to not drag my sniveling, virus-infected respiratory system back to the classroom to share my viral load with the students. I’m weird that way.

Also, public schools are not a baby-sitting service, even if some school officials think that’s their most important role.

Kent Hovind wacked me again!

Hovind responded to my challenge, which was to leave me out of his rigged debates and just go read a good book, by making me the subject of his “wack-an-atheist” show and most obviously, not reading a single goddamned book. I should have expected that.

I’m beginning to suspect he’s a liar, a fraud, and a fool. Just beginning.

This one isn’t any more cheerful

What nonsense, you may wonder, is going to afflict us next? Surely we’ve hit rock bottom. Nope.

Cult-like extremist movements appear to provide an antidote to the potent mixture of isolation, uncertainty, changing narratives, and fear we have experienced during the pandemic by offering a skewed form of safety, stability, and certainty, along with a cohort of people who are just like us, who believe us and believe in us. As the activist David Sullivan—a man who devoted his life to infiltrating cults in order to extricate loved ones from their grip—pointed out, no one ever joins a cult: They join a community of people who see them. In 2022, this appeal of cults will only grow, and those that arise next year will make QAnon seem like the good old days.

Yeah, great, I’m going back to bed. Wake me up in, oh, 2025 and I’ll reassess.

A little Sunday morning despair

High on my list of evidences that it’s all the media’s fault: that Tim Pool, a shallow, incompetent hack has gotten incredibly wealthy off of YouTube’s inscrutable algorithm.

It’s not just Pool and YouTube, though. I see the entire lineup of commentators on Fox News, FaceBook’s bizarre promotion of quackery everywhere, and the rise of 4chan (or whatever they call it nowadays) and its enabling of conspiracy theories. It’s everywhere. The entire damn country is soaking in a cesspool full of idiots bobbing at the top, and there are no checks on them anywhere. The only checks they see is the money billionaires sow to fuel a chaos they can profit from.