Pope Leo XIV is a trans man.
X, of course.
You don’t doubt this conclusion, do you? How can you question a guy who has dedicated his life to superimposing the outlines of skulls on celebrity photos and deciding what sex they are? Also, they’re a Christian.
Bones never Lie, but people do ~ wake up from their Lies ~
Genesis 1:27, 2 Timothy 3:13 ~ Glory to God and praise to Jesus.
Browse his Xitter feed and you will discover that practically no one is the the sex they say they are.
The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.
He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.
I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.
How many ignorant claims can a creationist pack into a short clip?
If there’s one thing the world uses to steal the hearts and minds of our kids it’s dinosaurs.
One thing? Absurd. We have all of reality to entice kids away from the lies of Answers in Genesis.
“Hey look kids. Look at these fearsome creatures. They’re amazing. They’re fascinating. They died out 65 million years ago. They’re products of evolution. They’re just the results of chemicals bumping together over millions of years.
Come on. If you’re going to convince people that evolution is not true, you should start by accurately describing it. No one claims that dinosaurs arose spontaneously from simple chemical processes.
Just like you, evolution’s true.” They use dinosaurs to convince our kids they’re nothing but rearranged pond scum.
We also don’t claim that.
Stop and think. Why would scientists be arguing that, when it’s not true, and wouldn’t accomplish much of anything? It’s clear that this guy is proselytizing and trying to recruit followers, so if we just assume that scientists have a similar, competing motive (we don’t), how does telling someone they are rearranged pond scum
serve our purpose? Or Satan’s purpose?
We use dinosaurs to call our children back to the authority of the word of God. We call dinosaurs missionary lizards because we want to give children sound biblical scientific answers about these incredible creatures.
I do appreciate that contradictory phrase, biblical scientific answers,
especially given that the Bible says nothing about dinosaurs. But AiG will tell us all about it! The next AiG video linked to by the above short is titled You’ve Been LIED to About How Dinosaurs Looked, which explains how a creationist artist uses the Bible to help him figure out how dinosaurs actually looked.
The unfathomable question is why AiG chose to use this AI-generated image of “dinosaurs” on their video?
Abomination, I say! Who is lying to kids about dinosaurs now?
Jesus. Look at the cover of Time magazine.
They’re not even close. Look! They’ve resurrected unicorns!
It’s ridiculous. They made a few genetic tweaks to a grey wolf, almost entirely cosmetic, to make puppies that kind of look like how they imagine a dire wolf would look like, and now the hype industry has gone insane. And now the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, is using this as an excuse to not worry about protecting species, because we can just call up Colossal to resurrect them.
Many scientists expressed skepticism that the pups could be classified as part of a canine species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the achievement demonstrates that it is not government regulations but innovation that will save species.
“It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” Burgum wrote in a post on X. “Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list — not additions.”
He has already met with the company about using its animals in federal conservation efforts, as well as for potential species restoration.
“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” he told Interior Department employees during a live-streamed town hall Wednesday. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.”
No one has ever celebrated additions to the endangered list, you ignorant buffoon. Colossal has never brought an extinct species back from the dead. And even if they could, if you’ve strip-mined the land and cut down the forests and polluted the streams, you’re not going to restore a species with a few artificially cultivated individuals. It makes me sick that this man who is supposed to be in charge of conserving our natural resources now imagines that he has carte blanche to take a chainsaw to every small animal because Colossal will bring them back.
Burgum posted these claims on Twitter, where he could expect to get agreeable comments from the usual fawning twits. For example:
@PhilStegem34522 Apr 7
Please look into the plight of PNW salmon and steelhead runs. The Marine Mammal Protection Act is a big part of the problem!!!
You clown. Do you think if we overfish salmon into extinction, followed by the death of orcas and sea lions, that we can then “fix” the problem by having Colossal restore them fish by fish, and mammal by mammal?
@MrsKinder Apr 8
Can we start protecting species by getting rid of wind farms?
No, MrsKinder, you’re an outrageously stupid cultist, and wind farms aren’t causing extinctions. Stop trusting the crap pouring out of Trump’s mouth.
Elon Musk has requested the ‘de-extinction’ company Colossal Biosciences to resurrect another animal after a successful dire wolf cloning feat.
Billionaire Elon Musk may be on the outs with President Donald Trump now but he’s still very much active on social media. With dire wolves seemingly back from dead now that the “de-extinction company” Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered three wolves that resemble the extinct real-life predators, the Tesla boss has shared his new pet wish
…
In a follow-up post, Elon Musk finally put forth his wish. He requested Colossal to “Please make a miniature pet wooly mammoth.” Notably, Ben Lamm and George Church’s Texas-based biotech company’s founding agenda was to bring back the woolly mammoth and “rapidly advance the field of species de-extinction.” Although the woolly mammoth’s cloned resurrection has yet to make it to the de-extinction success map, the company revealed last month that they’d made significant progress on that front, having bred woolly mice.
Holy fuck. No, making an existing mouse genetic variant does not mean that you’ve made significant progress
. You have not. I thought that was a stupid exaggeration, but now they’ve topped it with a species de-extinction
claim.
But if you want to see genuine idiocy, look at Musk’s request for a miniature pet wooly mammoth
. If it’s miniature and a pet, it is not a wooly mammoth. It is a toy for rich people.
Who does he think he is, that creepy JF Sebastian dude from Bladerunner?
Yeah, Musk probably thought that guy was awesome.
Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.
A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.
Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.
Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.
There are a few problems with those claims.
Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.
The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.
They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.
So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.
EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.
They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.
As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.
And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.
The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.
If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.
Bryan Johnson, that weirdo millionaire who wants turn aging backwards, taking megadoses of supplements and transfusing himself with blood from his son, has another game he plays with his kids: plethysmography! Every night they strap a measuring device on to their penises, and then the next morning they compare the frequency and duration of their erections.
So far, the kid is winning.
How many of you would make this effort for your kids? And still aren’t in prison?
Did you know that Darwinists are devolving, according to the Discovery Institute? They even have a picture of this devolution, so it must be true.
I guess they haven’t noticed that if you talk to any evolutionary biologists today, they all consistently rebuke the old cartoonish illustration of the ‘descent of man,’ so it’s silly to use that against us. But then that’s all they’ve got, the enshrinement of antique notions that they can attack without ever having to deal with the reality of modern biology. They’re claiming that the proponents of Darwinism seemed to be shrinking in stature
unaware of the irony of demanding that we defend Darwin — Darwinism, the narrow set of ideas that formed the core of evolutionary theory in the 1800s, is obsolete and outmoded. We aren’t defending those any more. We’ve got better, more complete models of how evolution works nowadays, and they don’t include illustrations of linear trajectories of changing individuals.
But this article from John West isn’t about the science, it’s about crowing over the defeat of their adversaries, even when no defeat occurred. So he marches through a small set of individuals, bashing them and claiming victory.
Consider Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the anti-ID polemic Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Miller was a gifted debater, but his arguments all too often relied on citation bluffing and critiquing straw-man versions of the ideas of Michael Behe and others.
Miller is still fighting, why is West using the past tense? Miller was part of the team that achieved possibly the greatest, most decisive defeat of the Discovery Institute’s agenda in the Kitzmiller trial. “Citation bluffing” seems to be the term they use to dismiss the fact that Behe’s claim of no scientific publications on the evolution of the immune system could be addressed by presenting book after book after book on the subject he claimed didn’t exist.
As for the claim of straw-manning creationists, I think it’s pretty silly to do that in an article where West constantly harps on Darwinism
.
Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, was even shallower in his critique. Indeed, if you read Collins’s book today, you’ll find that many of his arguments, including junk DNA, have been increasingly thrown overboard by mainstream science.
So who was left to champion the old time religion of Darwinism?
They have this delusion that junk DNA doesn’t exist, and that citing a few articles that have rightly shown some function for some tiny fraction of junk DNA means that the whole of it must be functional, and that their perspective is supported by “mainstream science.” It’s not. And why should they care? Mainstream science says that evolution is true!
Once again, they bring up this claim that Darwinism
is a religion. We can criticize Darwinism all we want without being thrown down into the pit of Hell.
Then, oh boy, they remember little ol’ me:
You also had biologist P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota Morris. He too could debate, although the quality of what you got was decidedly second rate. His preferred mode of discourse was invective. As he once instructed his fellow evolutionists, they should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots” — by which he meant, of course, anyone who dared to criticize Darwin’s theory.
John West has been crying about that quote since 2005. The Discovery Institute used it in their promotional materials. The suggestion that we stop being polite to known liars, frauds, and incompetents was so terrifying to them that they’ve spent the last 20 years whining about it. I’m kind of impressed with myself.
He still gets it wrong. Please do continue to criticize a theory that was assembled in 1859. I don’t mind that at all. But stop thinking that your primitive, poorly understood comprehension of an old idea is at all relevant or sufficient to rebut modern evolutionary theory.
Also, don’t expect me to be courteous when you dump a bucket of that bullshit on the podium in lieu of debating the science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.
I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.
Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.
Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.
By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.
I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness.
The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.
That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big.
Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.
Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.
The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.
It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.
They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.
Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.
A reader sent me a request to help him debunk an evolutionary psychology paper. It’s easy: it’s evolutionary psychology, which ought to be sufficient, but also it’s by Henry Harpending, notorious white nationalist and spewer of scientific
racism nonsense.
To be fair, I’ll give you a chance to read the paper and judge for yourself: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. The premise is that the operation of the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized. Our violent genes have been “pacified”. I tried looking up this concept of “genetic pacification” in the scientific literature — it seems to be a term of art used only by evolutionary psychologists, without any quantifiable definition. This paper claims to try, though.
Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.
You will not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no data presented anywhere in the paper. The authors cite a purported correlation between historical endorsement of the death penalty and a decline in the homicide rate, while ignoring all the other complex social changes that were going on over the same period of time, a typical reductionist strategem. The paper fails to provide any evidence that criminality is heritable, but just assumes that it is.
What the authors pretend is evidence is a model they have built, but they don’t report any details about how the model works, and report very few quantitative conclusions from it…which are pointless anyway since they don’t explain how they derived them. What the do tell us about the model makes it laughable, though. Here are the assumptions they’re working from, in addition to their assumption that crime is caused by genes:
1.The death penalty was the only selection pressure acting against personal violence;
2.Without the death penalty, condemned men would have each killed only one person on average over a normal lifetime;
and
3.Condemned men had no offspring at the time of execution.
I think we can dismiss their whole model out of hand, based on the obvious falsity of all three of those assumptions.
At least the authors didn’t feel any need to make the implicit conclusion explicit — that white westerners are genetically more civilized than all those other people in the world.
Didier Raoult, quack
We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!
The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.
It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!
The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.
But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.
Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.
A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.
There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.
The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.
According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.
28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.
