Look at how Poland reacted to their Supreme Court imposing more restrictions on abortion.
We have a few dozen major social concerns warranting mass protests and marches in the streets. Adding one more would be no problem at all. They’d all just merge into one gigantic rebellion sweeping across the country.
Our October fundraiser is over, and it was a success: we had fun, we hope we made readers aware of a few more of the many blogs here at the network, and we also raised about $2K, which will shortly be sent off to the people managing our legal debt. Everything was recorded using the magic of the interwebs, so if you missed it, you can still review everything online. Thank you all!
Now we’ll stop pestering you for donations. For a little while.
Our brains are spinning about a bit thinking of fun things to do for a Winter Festival* fundraiser, sometime after American Thanksgiving and perhaps in early December. This would be the perfect time for our readers to make suggestions about what you’d like to see and/or hear us do, and perhaps you have a favorite blog here that you’d like to see represented in the event. Speak up now, especially you donors!
*We have an election tomorrow, so who knows? Maybe we’ll have to do lessons on building barricades, or how to field strip an AK-47, or recipes for squirrel. We’ll be flexible.
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.
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.
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!
I only watched the first ten minutes — it was just too terrible. The very first creationist point turns out to be nonsense from Jeffrey Tomkins, and just answering that left me exhausted and nauseated.
We had a little quiz show today.
Our neighbors festooned a tree with bags of treats and an invitation to trick-or-treaters to take one.
I’ve been seeing cars full of kids pull up all afternoon, and by 4:00 it had been stripped bare.
This is the conclusion of our story chain, A Dark Web. You can find the previous chapters here:
Warning: this chapter is a bit heavy on the exposition, and includes a little bit of gore and violence. Maybe a bit of body horror, too, if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of spider/human chimeras.
A Dark Web: Part Six
[Read more…]
If you’ve ever wondered how giant pumpkins can get so big, Bethany Brookshire has the answer.
Giant pumpkins need a lot of water and sugar, and they need it fast. A typical giant pumpkin grows from seed to huge orange squash in only 120 to 160 days. At peak growth, it’s putting on 15 kilograms (33 pounds) every day. That’s like daily adding a two-year-old child to its mass. And all of that mass must move through the stem, Savage notes. Most of the time, the stem is so narrow that you can still easily get your hands around it.
To study how pumpkin stems transport so much food and water, she asked growers of giant pumpkins to donate small slivers of their competition fruits. She also got any pumpkins that burst before they could be judged. She even got small pumpkins that farmers had rejected before they plumped up. (To grow a massive pumpkin, farmers will only let one pumpkin on each plant reach full size.) She also grew a few of her own.
Savage took a close look at the stems, leaves and pumpkins and then compared them to those from other large squashes. Giant pumpkins don’t produce more sugars, she found. And their xylems and phloems don’t work differently. The titans just have more transport tissue. “It’s almost like there’s this mass growth of the vascular tissue in [the] stem,” she says. Extra xylem and phloem help the stem pump more food and water into the fruit, leaving less for the rest of the plant.
It’s a transport difference! We don’t appreciate the importance of transport in multicellular organisms enough.
Of course, what you really want to see are elephants smashing giant pumpkins.
They did the mash! Big thanks to giant pumpkin growers Larry Nelson and Jim Paino for the gourd time! pic.twitter.com/GSY23qJoBV
— Oregoth Boo (@OregonZoo) October 23, 2020
Hey, I just realized that we didn’t carve a pumpkin for our house this year! I guess the nonexistent trick-or-treaters won’t have anything to kick around.
This is so painful for me: Hayley Stevens has posted a measured critique of James Randi. It’s all true: Randi did flirt favorably with eugenics and climate change denial. He was a stage magician, not a scientist, and I can say from personal experience, from multiple long conversations with him, that it’s true. He would shy away from such ideas if he knew he was talking to a scientist, but he’d let the nonsense leak out, still. He had a poor reputation with women — he didn’t have much to do with them, which obviously didn’t affect me much, directly, but it did mean he was much more comfortable with us Old Boys and led to underrepresentation of women in the movement. He occasionally let that slip out, too, like his remark downplaying the sexual assaults of Michael Shermer, “Shermer has been a bad boy on occasion”. He personally introduced me to Lawrence Krauss, and was part of a conversation in which Krauss asked me to not criticize a certain guy named Jeffrey Epstein; Randi just knew Epstein as someone who liked sexy women and who donated to Krauss’s science efforts. Randi was immensely popular, but his lasting influence could have so much greater if he hadn’t been so narrow in many of his views. I hate to say it, but Stevens characterizes that movement entirely accurately.
This one isn’t so painful: Eiynah has a podcast titled “Woking Up” in which she totally shreds Sam Harris. Without reservation, I’d say that Harris’s ongoing popularity has been a disaster for atheism or the “New Atheism”, whatever that is, and she exposes the fact that he’s awfully supportive of racists and makes terribly bad arguments against the Left. I enjoyed that one, since I’ve never been a fan of the Harris school of deceptive reasonableness in the service of the worst possible takes. It’s easy to see right through him, and the people who can’t simply favor his polite racism.
No gods, no masters, and no goddamn hero worship.
Another icon has been eaten by 2020.
