Parasites flooding the COVID-19 literature with toxic nonsense

A viewer of my video about the claim that viruses come from space noticed something I had ignored: the list of coauthors on the Steele/Wickramasinghe paper. Wickramasinghe always stacks on a long list of coauthors, which is probably one of the ways he manages to buy in support for his trash papers. Anyway, one of his coauthors is peculiar: a fellow named Robert Temple, who is affiliated with something called The History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation, which appears to be nothing but a flashy website…an odd choice when you’re asked to list your prestigious associations. But then, Temple only has an undergraduate degree and exercises little discrimination in what he puts on his CV — I get the impression he’s one of those people desperate to get academic validation, but not so desperate that he’s willing to do the work.

His name seems to find its way on a fair number of Wickramasinghe’s papers, like this one, Growing Evidence against Global Infection-Driven by Person-to-Person Transfer of COVID-19, which tries to argue that you can’t get infected by contact with fluids from other people, so, by implication, everyone who has COVID-19 was directly infected by an infall of the virus from outer space. There may be some transmission through handshakes, he claims, but it’s primarily caused by a rain of viruses from space. This is irresponsible nonsense, and one could ask what the heck a guy with an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit is doing on the list of authors anyway. I guess if it also includes Brig Klyce, who my fellow old-timers from talk.origins will remember as the panspermia wackaloon who haunted newsgroups, they might as well chuck in any ol’ weirdo who voices support for their claims.

Jason Colavito has the full scoop on Temple. His claim to fame rests on a book called The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, in which he argues that “amphibious extraterrestrials from Sirius” provided advanced scientific knowledge to the Dogon people and to the Sumerians and to any random ancient culture he doesn’t believe was smart enough to actually have done the things they did.

Yeah, he’s one of those pseudoarchaeologists who believes in ancient astronauts. On the basis of those exemplary credentials, he’s now getting stuffed onto papers by the Panspermia Mafia. If you must, you can listen to him blather on for over an hour and a half on the Dogon people (I wasn’t able to listen to it — he’s one of the more goddamn boring and pretentious lecturers I’ve ever heard). Also, annoyingly, he calls himself “Professor Temple”, despite having no academic appointment anywhere. He obviously knows nothing about virology, epidemiology, or biology in general — he’s just a poseur who gets his name on papers he’s not qualified to critique. But then, I could say the same thing about Chandra Wickramasinghe.

When I tried to track down this coauthor, though, another discovery is that the Wickramasinghe group have gone on a disgraceful binge recently, taking advantage of legitimate concerns about the pandemic to flood various journals with bad papers about COVID-19. I’ll repeat what I said before: if a paper has Wickramasinghe’s name on it, it’s garbage. Use his name as a filter, and you’ll cull out a lot of dross. It’s too bad the scientific publishers haven’t figured this out yet and blacklisted him, as they should.

Every step in this sequence is equally stupid

Here’s an unremarkable correlation in idiocy.

  • You want to have an elaborate “gender reveal” party. We could stop right there, you can just fuck off now, I don’t want to be your friend.
  • You decide the reveal will be by some kind of flashy pyrotechnics. If you want to tell me the sex of your incipient child, just say “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl”. That’s adequate. I don’t need a flashy garnish. Congratulations!
  • You are going to set off your fireworks in CALIFORNIA? And you live there? And you’ve been warned over and over about the fire danger?

Well, that’s a regular cascade of predictable foolishness, with the end result of the El Dorado Fire. Brilliant.

Today is a holiday?

You know what that means — I get to spend the whole day catching up on grading and prep work for upcoming labs.

I scarcely know what “day off” means anymore. Somebody will have to explain it to me someday, but there’s no point now. Maybe when I reach that mythical state of retired, if ever that happens.

Oh! I did have a weird dream last night, that I had a massive abdominal tumor that surgeons cut out of me, and they proudly showed it to me when I was lying there on the operating table (of course I was wide awake and watching the procedure). It was marbled with fatty tissue and had tufts of blonde hair sprouting sparsely all over it, with a little knot of teeth at one end. They stabbed it with biopsy needles a bunch of times, sliced it open to show me all the pus inside, and then threw it into an incinerator. I said, “We have to name it Donald.” Then I woke up.

It was a very happy dream. Prophetic symbolism, you think?

#Dumbkirk was a glorious metaphor

It just gets better and better. All those supporters of 45 sailed out with flags and banners flying, and total chaos resulted.

The neat twist is that they did it to themselves — the problem was compounded by the request of the organizers.

Owners of boats of “all shapes and sizes” were encouraged to participate and to decorate them with “as many Trump flags as she can handle,” the event’s Facebook page said.

So the bigger boats of the richer Republicans charged out and put large wakes on top of already rough waters and swamped smaller boats. A perfect encapsulation of their policies.

Isn’t that nice of them to put on a demonstration of the class divisions they promote?

Musical accompaniment:

Nice.

An emblematic boat parade

45 loves ’em, so of course there’s another boat parade going on right now in Texas. Amusingly, though, the boats are sinking.

Multiple 911 calls have been made regarding boats being in distress, some sinking at the ‘Trump Boat Parade’ scheduled for Saturday afternoon on Lake Travis, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office.

TCSO confirmed with CBS Austin that multiple boats have been sinking and are in distress.

I hope no one gets hurt, but…heh. Heh heh heh.

MORE! MORE SPIDERS! YOU ARE ALL DOOOOMED!

I went off to feed the spiders this morning, and as I was going out the door, Mary asked if I needed any more egg sacs. “I hope not,” I replied, because I’ve got so many baby spiders to tend that I’m not sure what I would do if I had another round of hatchlings. So she cursed me. I found 7 nice new Parasteatoda egg sacs, and 2 new Steatoda triangulosa sacs. I tell you, I’m getting so good at breeding spiders I am currently oscillating between two states.

The only thing that will save me is that I expect, from past experience, that about half the egg sacs will contain only infertile eggs. It’s not my fault, the females are picky, and some of them constantly friendzone* all their suitors. Three of them are definitely from non-virginal, proven breeders, though, so I’m anticipating dealing with about 300 more babies soon.

By the way, I like to regularly remind you all that I have a Patreon, and if you want to see a photo of a hungry baby at the table, sign up!

*“friendzone”, in the native Spider, is synonymous with “murder and eat”. I suspect MRAs/Incels of being native Spider speakers, which has led to all kinds of confusion and erroneous ideas about the human version of the word.

Close enough to that time of year

Hey! Suddenly everyone is talking about pumpkin spice, and I’m feeling ignorant — I’ve had pumpkin pie and other sorts of things, but I’ve never gone out of my way to find and consume those heavily advertised pumpkin spice drinks, and now I can’t because they probably add extra virus to them. So does anybody have any recommendations for stuff I can make at home to get into the spirit of the season? I have cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves, which is all you really need, right? I suppose proportions and quantity matter. Bonus points for ideas that use coffee or tea. I’m going to try and ingratiate myself with my wife.

What this really means, though, is that it’s time to haul out the giant spider and hang it from the porch, string up the spider lights, and maybe start projecting spider videos on the windows, to appeal to the kiddies, who probably won’t be coming around to our house at Halloween this year because we’re handing out extra virus with our candy. We’ll still make an effort, because needs must.

Self-awareness isn’t their strong suit

Certain right wing grifters have found a new grift: hoisting themselves up on a comfortable, elevated perch, looking down on the peons, and crying about how they’re being crucified. Even better, they’ve found a way to turn the claim that they’ve been canceled into self-promotion. Behold, CancelCon!

Man, I only wish Rubin, Prager, Shapiro, and Corolla were being silenced, rather than merely using the claim that they were silenced as a way to amplify their noise.

You might wonder, how is a free event going to make them richer? It’s a promotional event for Prager/Corolla’s recent movie, No Safe Spaces, which was shown on 1 screen. They’ve got to do something to raise their revenue.

They also seem to be confused about that documentary. On the one hand, they’re oppressed, no one let’s them speak, they can’t get any respect…and on the other hand,

No Safe Spaces earned $1.3m at the box office and was the highest-rated film of 2019 as ranked by the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.

(They always have to have a qualifier in there, whether it’s “the greatest movie ever seen on a single screen” or “as ranked by an easily gamed popular site their fanatics crashed”)

So which is it? Are these incredibly popular speakers with great mobs of adoring fans hanging on their every word, or are they sad afflicted nobodies who have been totally canceled and have their mouths duct-taped shut? It doesn’t matter. They’re playing Oppression Olympics, and all that matters is how loudly they weep, and how many suckers fall for it. If there’s one thing we’ve had drilled into us over the last few years it’s that the world is full of gullible twits.

You aren’t one of them, are you?

I know I rag on physicists sometimes, but you’ve got to stop making it so easy

God damn it.

This is true, mostly. It’s the University of Illinois, and it was a physicist and a bioengineering professor (who had also done some ecological modeling) who came up with the model.

Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and bioengineering Professor Sergei Maslov, who developed models of the disease for the state and campus, said they think cases can be kept to a level that can be traced and won’t overwhelm the hospital system.

They also used a grossly simplified model of human interactions, which they claim was a “worst-case scenario”. It wasn’t.

“We did not model the friendship social networks of the students when they go outside and socialize in bars and restaurants,” he said. “So our calculation is, in fact, a worst-case scenario, because we assume more mixing outside of the university.”

Here’s an absolutely classic physicist comment from back in March.

For them, transitioning to epidemiology was easy. “The equations that describe epidemics are simplified versions of ones that describe ecology,” says Goldenfeld. For the COVID-19 model, they chose equations that echoed models of predator and prey.

So…epidemiology is easy, they just had to strip out a lot of complicating factors, and then adapt a general ecology model that isn’t actually appropriate here. In other words, they imagined a spherical frictionless undergraduate, made a model that they liked, and then — JESUS FUCKING CHRIST — got the ear of the governor of Illinois and set the policy for whole state.

And now…

Parties, gatherings and “irresponsible and dangerous” behavior has led to a spike of nearly 800 coronavirus cases on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, school officials said, and the university is cracking down.

On Wednesday, the university announced 780 new coronavirus cases on the campus, the Chicago Tribune reported. The campus is now implementing mandatory testing twice a week for all students.

You know, you could have listened to epidemiologists, who actually have some specific expertise in this sort of thing.