The future is battery powered

I remember the Olden Times when Rush Limbaugh (may he Rot in Peace) would rail against solar power — what will we do when the sun goes down? — and wind power — what about calm days? — and tell us to keep burning coal and gas.

Technology marches forward, and now we have these things called batteries that can smooth out the highs and lows of electricity production. Now when we hear about solar farms going up, they’re usually accompanied by energy storage farms. Here’s what energy production in California looks like:

Solar power production is swelling during the day, and is extended into the peak demand period with batteries. Maybe they could also expand wind power, and possibly be better at conserving energy? I think if I plotted energy usage at my house, it would be much more uniform: we don’t have air conditioning, and I’ve done more cooking with an eye towards preparing meals that can produce leftovers that last a few days.

As it is, California is sometimes producing more solar energy than it can use. They have to throttle solar power output back, or even pay neighboring states to take it.

Good things are happening here in Minnesota, too. We’ve got a gigantic energy storage facility going up in Becker, a town between Morris and the Twin Cities.

One of the largest solar projects in the country is moving closer to completion, and it’s not in a famously sunny state like California, Texas, or even Florida. It’s in Minnesota, on former potato farms near the site of a retiring coal plant.

The Sherco solar and energy-storage facility will be the largest solar project in the Upper Midwest, and the fifth-largest in the U.S. by the time it’s fully completed in 2026. The first phase of the project should begin sending emissions-free electricity to the grid this fall, heralding the start of a new era in a state whose largest solar project until now has been just 100 megawatts. This new project will have a capacity of 710 megawatts. It’s being built by utility Xcel Energy, which will also operate the facility once it’s online.

The project is poised to deliver on the many promises of renewable energy: It will partially replace the nearby coal plant set to retire over the coming years, address the variability of solar power by pairing it with long-duration storage, and provide good-paying union jobs in a community that’s losing a key employer in the coal facility.

They’re using iron-air batteries, which are cheaper and less toxic and less flammable than the now-familiar lithium batteries. It’s also positive that this facility is going up explicitly to replace a coal plant, one we often saw as we drove along I-94. It hasn’t been so prominent in recent years, I guess they’ve been gradually shutting it down and we don’t see the giant exhaust plumes so much any more.

Goodbye.

Even closer to home, my university has begun a major energy storage project.

For many years now, UMN Morris and UMN WCROC [West Central Research and Outreach Center], have explored the potential of energy storage in rural Minnesota.

Now, UMN Morris and UMN WCROC are partnering to launch the Center for Renewable Energy Storage Technology, or CREST. In order to reach high levels of renewable power generation, efficient and economic energy storage systems are critically needed. This field is poised for significant growth and attention in the coming years. The new UMN intercollegiate Center will provide leadership in research, demonstration, education, and outreach in this vital field by organizing teams and partnerships and incubating energy storage research and demonstration-scale projects.

A hallmark and unique characteristic of renewable energy efforts at the Morris campuses has been the ability to test systems at commercial or near-commercial scales. This scale is especially crucial in moving new technologies from labs into the commercial market. CREST will also expand opportunities for Minnesotans to learn more about energy storage technologies and potential applications. Recently, UMN WCROC announced it will host the $18.6 million US DOE ARPA-E REFUEL Technology Integration 1 metric ton per day ammonia pilot plant. In addition, WCROC received $10 million from the State of Minnesota in the 2021 legislative session through the Xcel Energy RDA account to develop ammonia-fueled power generation and self-contained ammonia storage technologies. UMN Morris announced a new project to develop a large-scale battery-storage demonstration project. These projects are done in collaboration with partners from across the University of Minnesota and with many partners in the public and private sectors.

It’s too bad we can’t rub Limbaugh’s face in the progress that’s being made.

OH PETER JACKSON NO

…and he caught Déagol by the throat and strangled him, because the gold looked so bright and beautiful. Then he put the ring on his finger.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a masterpiece. The Hobbit trilogy should not have existed. Now Peter Jackson is taking another drink from the well, making a new movie called The Hunt for Gollum. Did I say “movie,” singular? My mistake: it’s going to be at least two movies, and who knows how much bloat they’ll experience before the end. One paragraph in the article triggered my gag reflex.

Fans and critics on social media immediately speculated about the new film’s plot, given that Gollum appeared to die at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Appeared? May Shelob suck out your guts and spit them into a sewage pit, APPEARED? It was a key moment when Gollum fell into the lava burbling in Mt Doom. Please don’t even hint that there’s a possibility that some mindless, greedy studio executive might resurrect him. A prequel, maybe?

It doesn’t matter. I absolutely refuse to ever watch this cash grab. I’m not even tempted. The Hobbit was an adequate lesson.

I predicted the fate of Neuralink

Common problems with attempts to implant chronic electrodes — especially the ones with exceptionally fine wires — are the accumulation of scar tissue, that is the buildup of connective tissue, and shifting of the placement. You’re sticking delicate wires into a mass of reactive gelatin, inside a hard bony capsule, and the goo can shift. So it’s no surprise that Neuralink is not holding up.

Elon Musk’s neurotech startup Neuralink said Wednesday it has run into problems with a brain chip it implanted into a 29-year-old quadriplegic man earlier this year, with the issues considered so serious, it reportedly considered having the implant removed entirely.

In a blog post announcing the issues, Neuralink said its test patient, Noland Arbaugh, has begun losing the ability to efficiently control some technology using only his thoughts—the entire selling point of Neuralink.

Neuralink said those failures were caused by some of the implant’s 64 threads retracting and becoming unusable. It didn’t specify how many of the threads—the microscopic links that transport his brain signals to a chip that allows him to control technology with his mind—were impacted, nor did it say what caused the error.

I can guess what caused the error: biology and time. I’m sure those two things are trivial problems for Elon Musk to defeat, once he overcomes his other great enemy, carwashes.

Fringe bigots hack at Scientific American

Many people don’t seem to realize that City Journal is not a science journal, but a conservative policy rag published by the right-wing think-tank, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Typically, the only “science” articles they publish are bigoted nonsense to advocate for discrimination against non-white people and gay and transgender folk, which they unironically claim is actually bias against white straight people. They publish Chris Rufo and Colin Wright and Heather Mac Donald, for christ’s sake. This is the face of the New Racism, same as the old racism, that cloaks itself in assertions that they’re just talking about Science.

So now City Journal is condemning Scientific American for going “woke,” being in lockstep with progressive beliefs (horrors!), and just generally abandoning science in favor of that damnable belief that the human equation is an important factor in science. SciAm has surrendered to progressive ideology, that is, they don’t support the tired old conservative ideas that the City Journal favors. City Journal has published a long article documenting how SciAm betrayed true science. It’s not very credible to begin with since it comes straight from one of the modern purveyors of bad science — it’s a bit like reading Joseph Mercola complaining about Science-Based Medicine — but let’s take a look at how they make their case.

Right off the bat, I’m unimpressed. Their first case is Michael Shermer, the ghastly conservative Libertarian skeptic who was credibly accused of sexual assault, who was a columnist for SciAm until he was let go, finally, to the cheers of many. His column reeked. But, apparently, like many conservative writers, he expected to be employed by them forever, and was dismayed when SciAm stopped buying his drivel. He was shocked when they turned down one of his columns.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

I think you can see the problem. He’s claiming that the people who are fighting for progress don’t believe there has been any progress, a claim that is clearly false, but fits well with the Manhattan Institute dogma that everything is just automatically getting better, so why struggle? I can see why SciAm might be uninterested in promoting the contradictory garbage that Shermer kept writing, but then he just makes it worse.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

Notice that we’re already seeing the usual suspects pop up in the first few paragraphs: Pinker, Haidt, Mac Donald. We’re also seeing examples of Shermer’s self-serving dishonesty. Intersectional Theory lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups? Uh, what? Intersectional theory isn’t about “lumping” anything, but about teasing apart the multiple factors that influence individuals.

Intersectional theory views the categories of intersecting relations such as race, gender, social class, sexuality, ability, and age as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Taking these intersecting factors into consideration paves the way for understanding and explaining complexity in individuals, the world, and the human experience.

As a concept, intersectional theory contrasts monism, which is the idea that each factor of an individual (e.g., race and gender) can be adequately understood or investigated separately from one another, as a single dimension.

Fire Shermer for that biased misrepresentation, if anything. Unfortunately, biased misrepresentation is City Journal’s trademarked behavior, and if SciAm rejects it, he can find a new home at City Journal, which hates social justice with a fiery passion.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Let’s deal with each of those SciAm articles.

  • The ‘white patriarchal math’ article discusses how “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans” and only 30% to women. It mentions how historically women and black people were excluded from doctoral research programs. It describes the experiences of black women mathematicians who faced discrimination. These are facts. It’s an important issue in science, where we rely on a foundation of strong mathematical thinking.
  • The ‘obesity’ article explains the connection with racism.

    living in racially segregated, high-poverty areas contributes to disease risk for Black women. Low-income Black neighborhoods are often disproportionately impacted by a lack of potable water and higher levels of environmental toxins and air pollution. These factors add to the risk for respiratory illnesses such as asthma and lung disease. They also increase the chance of serious complications from COVID-19.
    Further, these neighborhoods typically have a surfeit of fast-food chains and a dearth of grocery stores offering more nutritious food choices. Food insecurity, which is defined as the lack of access to safe, affordable and nutritious foods, has a strong association with chronic illness independent of BMI.

    Facts. Why does City Journal hate them?

  • The ‘Wilson’ article both praises him and points out that “His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms” and that “It is true that work can be both important and problematic—they can coexist.” It’s main sin seems to be that it promotes nuance rather than the black-and-white dichotomy City Journal favors.
  • The ‘JEDI’ article argues that “When we label our initiatives, we must be careful about the universe of narratives and symbols within which we situate our work—and the cultural associations and meanings that our projects may take on, as a result.” Adopting pop culture is a mixed bag, and we should think carefully about the kind of baggage we take on. What it has to do with science ought to be obvious, that a magazine that’s all about popularizing science should be aware of the political implications of the language it uses. It is an entirely appropriate article for SciAm.

City Journal is relying on a knee-jerk reaction by their conservative readers to any accusation of bias, even when that bias is patent and easily demonstrated.

City Journal needs to dip into its well of familiar conservative wackos to further their case. Here’s Geoffrey Miller.

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Evolutionary psychologists shouldn’t get to accuse others of being flagrant and irrational! Notice, though, that it’s not just SciAm, it’s also Nature and Science and New Scientist, and also mentioned is the New England Journal of Medicine, that is getting “woke”. Maybe these “heterodox” thinkers should consider the possibility they’re on the wrong side, when all the eminent journals are against them?

This isn’t about fighting conservatives, but about fighting for reality, that thing that repels conservatives. City Journal goes on to complain that SciAm and other prominent science journals broke their apolitical stance by openly endorsing Biden over Trump in the last election. They don’t consider that maybe, just maybe, scientists ought to oppose political candidates that are so blatantly anti-science. There’s a point where impartiality becomes absurd.

Oh joy, then City Journal spends a great deal of effort promoting their obsessions about COVID. They think the Great Barrington Declaration was a work of science rather than a bizarre ideological claim that would never have worked, and that it was a media conspiracy to discredit them. Also, they are very irate that the “lab-leak” hypothesis of COVID’s origins was dismissed.

The reason the “lab-leak” nonsense was ignored was because

(1) the evidence strongly favors a natural origin, (2) there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that the WIV scientists were working on SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic started, (3) the most knowledgeable science experts agree that a natural origin is the most likely scenario, and (4) the media is misrepresenting the science and treating the two competing explanations as equivalent.

This is a trend in City Journal. They are also climate change deniers, while SciAm accepts the consensus of climatologists…therefore SciAm preaches bad science.

The mainstream science press never misses an opportunity to ratchet up climate angst. No hurricane passes without articles warning of “climate disasters.” And every major wildfire seemingly generates a “climate apocalypse” headline. For example, when a cluster of Quebec wildfires smothered the eastern U.S. in smoke last summer, the New York Times called it “a season of climate extremes.” It’s likely that a warming planet will result in more wildfires and stronger hurricanes. But eager to convince the public that climate-linked disasters are rapidly trending upward, journalists tend to neglect the base rate. In the case of Quebec wildfires, for example, 2023 was a fluky outlier. During the previous eight years, Quebec wildfires burned fewer acres than average; then, there was no upward trend—and no articles discussing the paucity of fires. By the same token, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a lower-than-average number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. between 2011 and 2020. But there were no headlines suggesting, say, “Calm Hurricane Seasons Cast Doubt on Climate Predictions.”

Most climate journalists wouldn’t dream of drawing attention to data that challenge the climate consensus. They see their role as alerting the public to an urgent problem that will be solved only through political change.

Do you want to know City Journal’s position on transgender issues? No, you don’t. They cite Abigail Schrier and Jesse Singal and the Cass Report, so you already know where they stand.

Scientific American has yet to offer an even-handed review of the new scientific skepticism toward aggressive gender medicine. Instead, in February, the magazine published an opinion column, “Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People.” Shockingly, it argues for even less medical caution in dispensing radical treatments. The authors approvingly note that “many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care,” arguing that patients should have “access to hormones and surgery on demand.” And, in an implicit warning to anyone who might question these claims and goals, the article compares today’s skeptics of aggressive gender medicine to Nazi eugenicists and book burners. Shortly after the Cass report’s release, SciAm published an interview with two activists who argue that scientists questioning trans orthodoxy are conducting “epistemological violence.”

Of course City Journal misrepresents the article — you should expect that at this point. It does accurately describe the long history of oppression of trans people, and yes, current TERFs/Gender Criticals . I guess City Journal couldn’t admit the accuracy of the title. They also can’t argue against the idea of epistemological violence, since that’s exactly what the Manhattan Institute does. And the comparison to Nazis isn’t that great a reach, since Neo-Nazis and anti-trans activists are finding common cause today.

Are the claims of trans activists, as reported in SciAm, that radical? Nope. They sound like humane, common sense ideas.

Trans activists have fought with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization that maintains these standards of care, by demanding greater bodily autonomy and depathologizing transsexuality. This includes pivoting to an informed consent model where patients make decisions about their own bodies after discussing the pros and cons with their doctors. Trans activists have been rallying against medical authority since the early 1970s, including calling for access to hormones and surgeries on demand.

There’s nothing wrong with autonomy, consent, and resistance to an authority that has been historically in opposition to the needs of human beings. Unless, of course, you’re a City Journal reader. They hate that stuff.

At least the case is clear. If you think climate change is real, that we should respond to epidemics with evidence-based policies, that we should not ignore the consequences of racist policies, that trans people have rights, that Nazis are bad, and that science has social obligations, then read Scientific American (and Nature and Science and New Scientist and the New England Journal of Medicine.) Do read critically, though — you don’t have to agree with every word in those journals.

If you oppose those ideas, read City Journal.

We couldn’t get anyone interesting?

The UMM commencement ceremony is on Saturday. I’ll be attending in my black robes and funny hat, reluctantly. I go to celebrate the students, but the program is so predictable, and they usually get the most boring speakers. This year, it’s the interim president of the university and former bigwig at Hormel, the spam company, and I’ll be surprised if he says anything but platitudes.

It could be worse. Ohio State’s commencement speaker was a guy named Chris Pan, an entrepreneur, who wrote his speech with the aid of ChatGPT and ayahuasca, led the graduates in a sing-along, and spent a chunk of his time promoting BitCoin, which prompted loud boos from the audience. At least I don’t think we’ll have to suffer through that this weekend.

Maybe it’s for the best that we don’t have any weird speakers.

A spider banquet!

Now that spring is actually here — blue skies, balmy weather, all that stuff — and I no longer have classes to worry about, I’m getting back into the habit of going for a daily walk. As you might expect, I take this as an opportunity to look for spiders.

There is no significant spider presence yet.

However, as a portent for the future, look at all the spider food (some might call them mayflies) I spotted clinging to walls around town!

Big deal, you might say, I saw a few bugs. Let’s step back a moment and look at the big picture.

All those speckles and dots? Mayflies. The entire town is covered with mayflies. As I walked along, I could just put my foot on a patch of grass and a cloud of gnats, midges, and flies would rise up.

I’m hoping that this will be a great summer for spiders.

Politicians making icky confessions

Kristi Noem may have callously killed a puppy, but RFK Jr. claims he has a dead worm in his brain.

In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.

Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.

While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.

The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.

This is a real thing called neurocysticercosis. It is unusual for political candidates to chat about the worms eating their brain while on the campaign trail, though.

Several infectious disease experts and neurosurgeons said in separate interviews with The Times that, based on what Mr. Kennedy described, they believed it was likely a pork tapeworm larva. The doctors have not treated Mr. Kennedy and were speaking generally.

Dr. Clinton White, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said microscopic tapeworm eggs are sticky and easily transferred from one person to another. Once hatched, the larvae can travel in the bloodstream, he said, “and end up in all kinds of tissues.”

Though it is impossible to know, he added that it is unlikely that a parasite would eat a part of the brain, as Mr. Kennedy described. Rather, Dr. White said, it survives on nutrients from the body. Unlike tapeworm larvae in the intestines, those in the brain remain relatively small, about a third of an inch.

What next? Is some politician going to confess to paying for sex with a porn star?

Grendel was a T. rex?

You’ve got to appreciate a little theological infighting. I don’t usually bother to read Catholic Answers, but this example made me laugh.

First, though, the Catholic church isn’t equivalent to Ken Ham’s or Kent Hovind’s weird little cults. Catholicism is a bit more waffly about the science, so this article starts with a disclaimer: the Church doesn’t take a strong stance on evolution, so you can’t use the truth or falsity of evolution to defend the faith.

I want to make it clear that the Catholic church does not have a teaching about the theory of evolution or the extinction of the dinosaurs. You can be a faithful Catholic and deny or accept evolution. You can be a faithful Catholic and believe the sun revolves around the earth. The Church doesn’t teach on these scientific questions. Now Hall says he does not want to dogmatize young earth creationism and I appreciate him saying that. He just asks that people like me not use evolution to evangelize others.

OK, it’s a troubling position to take, but I get what they’re going for. If I want to promote stamp-collecting, philately doesn’t concern itself with 20th century steamships, so don’t use your ideas about the sinking of the Titanic to convince people to collect stamps. It’s irrelevant and unnecessary.

On the other hand, though, it does rather undermine the expectation that Catholicism is at all interested in truth when they avoid the science, but that’s a different debate. Some other time…

What I found interesting is that they talk about a different breed of young earth creationist argument that I hadn’t heard of before. Isn’t it delightful that they keep coming up with increasingly insane beliefs? I had heard the claim that the dragon in the myth of St George and the Dragon was an example of a dinosaur that had persisted into the Middle Ages, but this is a new one on me: Grendel in Beowulf was a dinosaur. Specifically, a T. rex. This guy at the Kolbe Center says Grendel perfectly matches the description of some sort of T. rex dinosaur.

However, Hugh Owen, the director or the Kolbe Center says these historical sources do describe dinosaurs in medieval England. He cites the creature Grendel in the 10th century English epic poem Beowulf as an example.

Okay. First, Grendel is a male not a female and Beowulf rips out his arm and kills him before killing Grendel’s mother with a sword. Second, it’s silly to say that this means Grendel was a T-rex with stubby arms and a human being really killed a T-rex in this way. The idea that Grendel was a T-rex attacking 7th century Danish people comes from Creationist Bill Cooper’s book After the Flood. The problem is that, contra Owen and Cooper, Grendel is not specifically described in Beowulf. Grendel is said to be a descendant of Cain and that he is to be larger than any other man and Grendel’s mother is said to be in the form of a woman. They were probably some kind of hominid or human life monster, they definitely weren’t a pair of T-rexes.

To quote myself, “It’s hard to be funny about creationism because it is such obvious bullshit that I feel like all you need to do is transcribe what they say literally and stand back and go “See? See?” while underlining and circling their own words.” That’s a perfect example.

It’s gone past funny to depressing

Creationists are pathetic and detestable.

The alt text on this comic reads, “Disappointed with myself that I haven’t done a creationism joke in years. Six years is like 0.1 percent of the past.” I sympathize. It’s hard to be funny about creationism because it is such obvious bullshit that I feel like all you need to do is transcribe what they say literally and stand back and go “See? See?” while underlining and circling their own words. They make comedy about creationism redundant.

What’s worse is that creationists are so damn serious about their fairy tales. Look at Stephen Meyer or Ken Ham — they’re so full of themselves and so committed to stating such ridiculous garbage while keeping a straight face. And it’s so sad to see people so adamant about wasting their lives defending the indefensible, and expanding the mythology by compounding the nonsense.