You know, all those tubes and oozing liquids, it’s hard to know where my cerebrospinal fluid ends up.
During intercourse the woman absorbs the literal cerebral fluid and essence of the man, the fluid that contains the nutrients the man chooses to feed his brain; so don’t ever “it’s just sex, im free and liberated” me.
General Jack D. Ripper would be so proud. People who understand biology, not so much.
Have you heard about this latest loony claim that you don’t need eyeglasses? It’s all a scam by Big Opthalmology, and with a heavy dose of woo you can see perfectly clearly.
Rebecca Watson digs into it — it turns out this is nothing new, there was something called the Bates Method about a century ago that didn’t work, either.
I don’t know how long I’ve needed glasses. I know I couldn’t see clearly for a good chunk of my childhood, and it was only in my second year of high school that my mother took me in to get my eyes examined (I am very nearsighted) and I walked out with a new pair of glasses. I still remember how astonishing it was to be able to read a big “DRUGSTORE” sign from across the street, and see birds a whole block away. If only I’d known earlier that I could have fixed the whole problem by flexing my chakras and sniffing aromatic oils.
The USA has been one-upped. Our congress listened soberly as crackpots told them all about UFOs whizzing about through our skies, but the Mexican congress got to see alien bodies.
Body and fonction présentation Alien MEXICO🛸Subtitle added on 80% of videos #UFO #UFOs #ufotwiter #USA #UFOSightings #UFOTuesday #Aliens #OVNI #ufomexique #ufotwitter #ufoX pic.twitter.com/00cK9spHIr
— Quantica (@QuanticaScience) September 13, 2023
Are you impressed by all the anatomical details, the CAT scans of the bodies, the boldness of the speaker? I hope not. Here’s a video of these specimens.
They’re doll-sized. They look like they’re made out of papier mache.
I suspect they’re a bit like the Fiji mermaids, which were made from monkey bodies stitched to fish. I’m going to guess these are mangled and manipulated animal bones, crudely covered with a rough matrix of some sort, and that’s it.
Putting three eggs in one of them was a nice touch, though.
Bill Maher made an announcement.
I agree. That is very unfortunate.
He kept writing, and made it even worse.
He’s a scab. OK, it’s coming back, only now with no writers and just his trademark smarmy ignorance.
I haven’t watched his show in years, maybe a decade or so. I’m confident that it has not improved, and this will simply be another inflection point in which the quality of the show nosedives for the garbage heap.
I just waved goodbye to my daughter and granddaughter — they’re driving back to Wisconsin. We had an exhausting weekend with a 4 year old (soon to be five!) who was full of energy and was running circles around us.
No sooner had they left than I sit down and read about Ruby Franke.
Ruby Franke, the family vlogger behind the now-defunct YouTube channel 8 passengers has been formally charged with six counts of felony child abuse by a Washington County attorney in Utah, court documents show.
Franke and her business partner, Jodi Hildebrandt, were arrested last week after Franke’s 12-year-old son climbed out a window and ran to a neighbor’s house asking for food and water.
The neighbor, noticing duct tape around the child’s ankles and wrists, called the police. The responding officer said the child appeared severely malnourished and had sustained “deep lacerations” from being tied up with a rope.
When police searched Hildebrandt’s home, they found Franke’s 10-year-old daughter in a similar condition and transported both children to the hospital for malnourishment. In total, the four Franke children still living at home were taken into the care of Utah’s Child and Family Services. Her two other children are adults.
Hildebrandt was also charged with six felony counts of aggravated child abuse.
I am at a loss. I cannot imagine doing that to a child. But I can see three factors in the story that would drive a person to child abuse, not that it excuses it.
Now Franke’s sisters have issued a statement.
“For the last 3 years we have kept quiet on the subject of our sister Ruby Franke for the sake of her children. Behind the public scene we have done everything we could to try and make sure the kids were safe,” the statement began.
“Ruby was arrested which needed to happen. Jodi was arrested which needed to happen. The kids are now safe, which is the number one priority.”
Oh, yeah? You knew about this for three years and said nothing?
Her neighbors commented.
The neighbors of recently-arrested YouTube family vlogger Ruby Franke were reportedly not surprised to see her Utah home swarmed by police. Some were just happy that the authorities weren’t pulling bodies from the house.
“Everyone is just breathing a collective sigh of relief because we thought they were going to come out of that house with body bags,” one of her neighbors told NBC News.
It was so bad that you were anticipating dead children, but you didn’t call CPS? This is just disturbing, that everyone knew and everyone kept kept quiet, and that Franke also had 2 million subscribers to her creepy YouTube channel, and all those people just watched.
That’s a little unfair. At least some of them complained enough that YouTube finally took the channel down. She just moved on to another inappropriate grift.
The channel was taken down earlier this year amid a growing chorus of criticism over Franke’s strict parenting tactics, which included threatening to take away meals.
In recent weeks, Franke had been collaborating with Hildebrandt on ConneXions, a mental health counseling service that also faced criticism for its parenting advice, including shame-based learning and shunning those who don’t share your values.
Hildebrandt is another piece of work, an ex-therapist who had her license revoked.
The founder of the company, Jodi Hildebrandt, is a therapist who had her license suspended in 2012 after she disclosed a patient’s “porn addiction” to his Mormon church leaders, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
It’s astonishing that anyone would take mental health advice from either of those two losers.
By the way, their Instagram channel, Moms of Truth, is still up and available if you are really interested in seeing a pair of hypocrites complaining about “woke.”
You were expecting little green men?
Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.
From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.
Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”
“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.
The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.
I've been waiting for a long time to finally post this paper. I co-authored a paper with Avi Loeb analyzing the samples we collected from the Pacific Ocean. We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium,… pic.twitter.com/DRNCk5cL3A
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 29, 2023
Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.
So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.
What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.
The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.
I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.
But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.
In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”
He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.
If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.
From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.
It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”
Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!
Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)
Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.
You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.
By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.
I unlimbered my rusty, drugged-up voice to answer a really simple question today. Unfortunately, it’s the same goddamn stupid question I get from Muslim apologists all the time, and they don’t listen to the answer anyway, but I’ve been practically voiceless for a few weeks, so this was an excuse to, you know, speak again.
I can’t believe I have to start lecturing again in a week and a half.
Transcript below:
Finally, one quack goes down. The notorious anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny has had her medical license suspended, at long last. It should have been done long ago.
Two years ago, a Cleveland area physician strode into the House Health Committee room and told state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccines magnetize their hosts and “interface” with cell towers.
Her comments, the subject of widespread ridicule, triggered a swarm of 350 complaints to the State Medical Board and a chain of events that led to the regulators indefinitely suspending the medical license Wednesday of anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny.
Oh, yeah, the magnetized people claim. It’s as stupid as it sounds.
It was June 2021, just as scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines began to wane and health officials focused on the yeoman’s work of convincing hundreds of millions of Americans to take up the novel products. However, many conservatives sought to undercut this campaign, often under arguments about “medical freedom.” Tenpenny, speaking before a crowd of anti-vaccine activists, warned of purported dangers of vaccines with a firehose of debunked and misleading statements.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said to the panel of lawmakers.
“They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks … There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”
Behold my magnetic powers!
Although…it’s true. I’ve received many vaccinations, and I just tested it, and look, I can make pennies stick to my forehead! I’ve been able to do this for my whole life, though, and I can’t say it’s particularly useful. I guess I could entertain my granddaughter for a minute and a half with that trick. Or drive an anti-vaxxer into a frothing fury for a couple of years.
Unfortunately, stripping Tenpenny of her medical license won’t slow her down in the slightest. It’s not as if she’s been practicing medicine all this time, she instead peddles “alternative” treatments to the gullible. Being denied a license by The Establishment will probably enhance her reputation among her clientele.
Her podcast is still squawking lies into the æther, and she has the ear of influential people — such as Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo recently appeared on the podcast of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, where he continued to make claims about vaccines that are contradictory to widespread medical consensus.
Medical experts have said Ladapo’s claims are dangerous, and that his very presence on the podcast — and other recent appearances on shows promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories — gives credibility and support to anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Lapado’s latest comments are part of a litany of dubious claims that have alarmed public health officials in Florida and across the country since he got appointed surgeon general more than a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
This is a guy who says the risks of the COVID vaccines outweigh the benefits for most people, who has blocked the use of COVID vaccines in Florida, and refuses to use a mask — but he is a Harvard graduate, you know. He’s also blatantly ideological and conservative, making his comments to Tenpenny particularly ironic.
Despite being the head of Florida’s Department of Health, Ladapo bashed a majority of the nation’s physicians for their vaccine beliefs, saying they cannot separate themselves from their ideologies and politics.
“Our colleagues, for the most part, can’t be brought back into alignment with reality,” Ladapo said on the podcast. “I don’t have any faith that most of our physician colleagues, sadly, can be rehabilitated.”
Tenpenny went so far as to compare current doctors with those in Nazi Germany who participated in or didn’t oppose the mass killing of and experimentation on people, namely Jews, citing a passage written into the first page of the foreword of Ladapo’s own book, which he promoted on the podcast.
Kudos on getting a license suspended after years of talking, but Tenpenny isn’t going to hesitate and is going to continue to poison the discourse for many more years to come — and she’ll make bank off it, too.
Yesterday, I asked “How can obvious fraud Avi Loeb continue to bamboozle?”, and of course lots of people were happy to answer. He has a sugar daddy named Charles Hoskinson.
Charles Hoskinson, the charismatic founder of Cardano, one of the foremost blockchain platforms, has embarked on an unprecedented expedition to investigate the mysteries of outer space. Hoskinson has taken his passion for exploration to new heights by searching for aliens and UFOs in uncharted regions of the universe. This audacious endeavor exemplifies Hoskinson’s daring and the insatiable human curiosity that compels us to explore uncharted territories.
Charles Hoskinson’s search for aliens includes examining claimed UFO encounters and anomalies and examining them from a scientific perspective. He works with specialists from various disciplines, such as astrophysics, astronomy, and data analysis, to learn more about these puzzling events. Hoskinson hopes to create data-driven approaches that can help discover trends or anomalies that might point to extraterrestrial activity by utilizing his knowledge of blockchain technology.
Oh. It’s a science fraud milking a crypto fraud for money. Parasites on parasites on parasites all the way down. Somehow, that’s less distressing than learning they’ve pulled shenanigans on legitimate scientific institutions, but still, at the root, they’re taking money from gullible investors and pouring it into a big magnet at the bottom of the ocean.
I also learn that Hoskinson is a backer of George Church’s pie-in-the-sky company Colossal, that plans on using biotechnology to resurrect mammoths and dodos and thylacines. They won’t. But they’ll all get lots of press and persuade non-scientists to cough up cash.
Hey, any rich people with a deficit in understanding and reason want to fund my research on comparative life histories of local spider populations? I could make it weirder by speculating that spider webs reveal linear seams between the polygons that make up our universe, and therefore could be a means to access outer dimensions of existence. I could do a lot with $1.5 million, the amount wasted on Loeb’s expedition.
I should be grateful to Avi Loeb. He’s done so much to besmirch the power of the phrase “Harvard professor,” which journalists like to deploy as evidence that someone must be a super-smart guy when it means nothing of the kind. Someone must be able to see through the bullshit in his latest claims, right?
A Harvard professor said Monday he may have uncovered evidence of alien life in the universe and told Americans it would fundamentally change their understanding of their existence.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb said Monday on “Fox & Friends” that he examined an object moving through space
faster than 95% of stars near the sunthat hadmaterial strengthand was tougher than most rocks.The professor, who is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, explained that he could not
quantifythe object that he was studying just yet.
He’s got nothin’, but he’ll babble about nothing to get his airtime on Fox News and his tabloid coverage.
What actually happened is that a meteor plunging through the atmosphere over Papua New Guinea melted and exploded, and Loeb rushed to the area, trawled a magnet through the ocean, and pulled up some tiny metal spherules that he wants to pretend are alien artifacts.
Here, want to see some of his evidence?
Enhance!
Yeah, that’s it. They’re doing an isotope analysis and plan to publish a paper on it. I’m not sure what result that they expect to get that would constitute evidence of alien life — they’re going to find that they’re mostly iron, and any reliable isotope data might show that they’re billions of years old, as we’d expect from an extraterrestrial rock.
Fortunately, some scientists are speaking out.
Now, though, a number of scientists have countered Loeb’s claims. The New York Times piece, for example, points out that Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, explained that the meteorite would have been completely incinerated entering Earth’s atmosphere if it was traveling at the speed that Loeb claims.
Desch went as far as saying that Loeb’s comments constitute “a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method, and it’s so demoralizing and tiring.”
Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario, concurred, suggesting that Loeb shouldn’t make such bold proclamations during the early analysis phase — it’s not uncommon for detected events to appear interstellar at first only to be chalked up to a measurement error.
I think the reason that Loeb still has his position and his appointment to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that it is “so demoralizing and tiring” to deal with gullible journalists who’ve fallen for this ridiculous charlatanry.
Hey, journalists: here’s the real question that popped into my head when I read this story. Avi Loeb was able to charter a ship (expensive!) and crew (more expensive!) and load it with some specialized mining gear (not cheap, I imagine) and drag it back and forth across the ocean floor, while getting photos taken of his smug, grinning face. He has sent samples to various labs around the world to be assayed, not something you’ll pay for out of pocket.
Who’s paying for it? I would be shocked if this barebones speculation and literal fishing expedition could have passed peer review, and if it did, there are some committees at NSF that need to be flensed.
So please, this is journalism 101. Follow the money.
