Welcome to our muddled hellscape

I totally shunned all sources of news yesterday and last night — I remember the 2016 election, and I expected my country to let me down, again, yet there were so many annoying sources gloating about an imminent landslide. It was better to avoid all the suffering of an agonizing night of ups and downs that would only end in disappointment and disillusionment.

When I got up this morning, and once I’d had a sip of coffee, I recorded my reaction to opening up the news for the first time in 24 hours. Bleeah. Shouldn’t have bothered.

The answer is…we don’t know who won yet. We may not know for a while, even though our Preznit has predictably declared victory. The fact that couldn’t get a definitive majority when one candidate was a corrupt, incompetent ass, and that we’re still playing games with that archaic electoral college, tells me that I’m living in a shithole country run by corporate stooges pandering to an ignorant, racist white electorate. At least we’ve once again established that fact, even if our media will continue to make excuses and the Fox Propaganda Channel will continue to deny reality.

I thought enrollments were supposed to be down?

Yikes. It’s the first day of spring term registration, first thing in the morning, and my genetics class is already full…plus I’m giving a few students permission to take it beyond capacity (I’m splitting all the labs to meet pandemic requirements).

Spring: all the anxiety and overwork of the fall, only with crappier weather. They better cure this pandemic soon, or I may keel over from the stress.

Oh, wait. Pandemics don’t happen anymore.

Well, if a Harvard Professor says so, it must be true.

Now that you’ve voted, I’ve got another job for you

This is important. Turn off your TV. Don’t visit five fucking thirty eight. Don’t check CNN every five minutes. You know that “election night” is a social construct, right? It’s an event contrived by television to fuel an obsession with minute-by-minute election returns, so that you’ll center your life for at least a day around watching advertising, just as all the media have turned elections into a horse-race monster where all that matters is who is ahead right this minute. That process culminates today and tonight in goddamn stupid election night parties and people spending their evening in the the glow of their TVs, listening to assholes making state-by-state predictions and pontificating on the “will of the American people” and solemnly declaring that one person ultimately has a “mandate”.

Don’t waste your time. Go play a video game or watch a movie or have sex or read a book or do your fucking grading or cook something delicious or go for a walk. Anything else. You’re fascinated with politics? Fine. Sit down and make a list of effective actions you can take, starting tomorrow. Plan your election strategy. Call up your local pols — it’s not as if they’re doing anything, they’re all glued to their TVs — and talk to them about policy.

Slap yourself out of the “event” mindset. This election is the result of years of accumulating bullshit, and it’s only going to be corrected by years of shoveling. If the less-evil guy wins, your hard work is just beginning. If the evil guy wins, well, you’re going to have to tear the whole system down, which is even more work, and you won’t get that done in a day and a night of listening to Jake Tapper yapping vapidly.

You voted. That’s your sole substantive contribution to politics today. Now do something else.

P.S. If you’ve already been roped into some election night waste-of-time, the only solution is to turn it into a drinking game. Bring a fifth of whisky and a fifth of tequila, and tell that annoying person who is making you suffer through this that they have to take a shot a) every time a loser from the primaries is asked to opine, b) every time they make a big show of changing the color of a state on a giant map, c) whenever the say the words “too soon to call”, and d) there is a lull in the incoming data that they fill with a network airhead babbling his opinions. If the network brings on some wretched evil dinosaur like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, or Rick Santorum, you have to chug until they’re off the screen, or you lose consciousness. Your night will be mercifully brief, I promise.

It’s a wrap!

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.

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!