I hate Traditional Chinese Medicine

Quacks, every one, and monsters promoting destruction of the unique and precious. Look what they’ve done in the name of giving impotent, tiny-dicked ignoramuses a magic potion:

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Poachers have butchered the last adult rhinoceros at a South African game reserve, cutting off her horn and letting her bleed to death, the chief game ranger says.

Rhino horns are just large lumps of keratin, nothing more. They do nothing to make men attractive, they don’t enhance an erection, they don’t increase desire. You might as well make a pill from ground-up fingernail clippings, it is the same thing.

But there is one thing that does enhance virility…

No, I shouldn’t say it. It’s a closely guarded secret.

It’s too dangerously effective. It’s a formula that will make your penis grow 4 inches in a day, make you multi-orgasmic, and generate steely erections that stay up for 3 hours and 59 minutes (if you have an erection that lasts 4 hours or more, see your doctor).

But then, since they’ve just about exterminated rhinos, I guess it’s only fair that I mention the alternative.

The magic ingredient is…

The one indispensable component of this formula is…

The ground-up genitals of TCM pharmacists. Shocking, I know, but it’s a fact. TCM pharmacists never have sexual problems because they are constantly doping themselves up with their panaceas, and their tissues are saturated with the most effective reagents in their pharmacopias.

The best way to collect them and maintain their active properties, of course, is to hover over a TCM pharmacy in a helicopter, and wait for the proprietor to step out; then hit him or her with a tranqulizer dart, rappel down, and then swiftly chop out the magic organ with a chainsaw. After you’ve flown away, throw the bloody bits in a blender with a dozen raw oysters and some tequila, and swallow the liquified results straight down.

If the TCM pharmacists are over-harvested, the second best source of good virility enhancing tissue is the crotches of the people who have been gobbling down TCM remedies, including, of course, the one I just gave you (I have never taken any TCM potions in my entire life, I quickly assure you).

Of course, I do not personally endorse this protocol. But you know, boys will be boys, and spoiled rich Asian tycoons will be spoiled rich Asian tycoons.

And a bright and cheery good morning to you, too!

You know, every morning I get up and try to plow through the flood of email I get overnight, and it’s always full of these dire stories and horrible events. So here I will share with you a little sense of how I feel when I open my mailbox.

It’s amazing that I’m still such a happy fellow. I think the giggles are a consequence of being punch-drunk, though.

A war against mosquitoes?

Well, this was a weird article in Nature that made me think, at least: A world without mosquitoes. I was surprised to learn that there are actually ecologists/entomologists who believe the world would be a better place if we could simply exterminate entire genera of winged pests — that mosquitoes fill a readily replaceable niche, that they make minimal positive contributions to ecosystems, and we’d gain immeasurably from removing animals responsible for so much human suffering. The one thing they also agree on, though, is that there is no way to do it.

And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can’t seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. “They don’t occupy an unassailable niche in the environment,” says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. “If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.”

The article does mention mosquitoes immense contributions to biomass in general in many environments, particularly in the arctic, but this doesn’t seem to perturb the mosquito-haters. It’s odd, since I live in Minnesota, where we get clouds of the bitin’ beasts, and they are regarded as major nuisances…but at the same time everyone understands that they also feed the fish that stock our lakes. I don’t think a widespread mosquito extinction program would be entirely popular.

The commenters on the article seem much more sensible. I was happy to see one quoting Aldo Leopold:

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

The article mentions, for instance, that every animal in an arctic caribou herd loses 300 mL of blood a day to the depredations of mosquito swarms, which is definitely horrific for the caribou—but that’s biomass that’s getting transferred to birds and bats and fish. It seems to me that preventing that would be a rather substantial blow against species diversity, even if it did make some big charismatic mammals much more comfortable.

Who are you gonna save, zombies or sharks?

I know you all think sharks are tough, vicious eating machines which have thrived for hundreds of millions of years, but many species face extinction from overfishing, unprincipled slaughter, and, well, the zombie menace.

Seriously, they’re at risk, and some organizations are working to save sharks. And unfortunately, that requires money. Currently, one group from Shark Rescue is in a desert race to raise attention about the plight of the sharks, and to raise money (there aren’t many sharks in the Gobi Desert, I know, but the goal is planetary awareness, with sharks as just one example). Donate if you can.

Compensate for the zombie depradations, if nothing else.

7 out of 8 isn’t bad

I actually listened to a little bit of that Chopraesque blithering about the Gulf from “Evolutionary Leaders” — I really, really despise them for taking that name — and you can, too, at this link. I don’t recommend it: the incompetent boobs who set it up had created a two-way conference call with swarms of people, and configured it so every time someone dialed in, there was a chime…a horrible, awful piercing chime. So throught the whole thing you get to hear ‘ping – ping – ping – ping’ at about the same volume as the speakers. It will drive you insane, if listening to Chopra doesn’t do that to you first.

I still hate these slimebags, but I do have to admit, Chopra actually gave some practical advice, and it wasn’t quite as awful as I feared. Except for the pinging. And I did give up early, so it could have gone downhill fast. Here’s Chopra’s list of things for people to do, and all except the last one are reasonable.

  1. Give direct financial aid

  2. Learn more about organizations

  3. Volunteer to help organizations

  4. Engage in global conversations with social networks

  5. Make conscious choices that are green

  6. Support investments in sustainable technologies

  7. Educate yourself on successful approaches

  8. Support spiritual education — the cause of the problem is scientific dualism that separates the organism and the environment

I was impressed — he actually didn’t propose thinking happy thoughts to change the universe, so he greatly exceeded my expectations. That last one is standard Chopra ignorant inanity and makes no sense at all, but we can always hope that the listeners are so tired after doing the first seven that they get to #8 and decide it’s a good time to take a nap.

So, not very enlightening, at least some practical if slightly fuzzy suggestions, and one moment of anti-scientific folly from the woo-meister. Not that bad.

Except for the pinging, which will haunt my nightmares.

“Climategate” slowly deflates

After the computer break-in that revealed so-called ‘damaging’ emails in the East Anglia Climate Research Group, after all the media hysterics and errors and misrepresentations, now at last some newspapers are coming out and admitting that they screwed up. Any idiot could just look at the released emails and see that they didn’t call the substance of the data into question, but the media took the profitable way out and fanned the flames of denialism.

It’s rather like the Andrew Wakefield story. Take a very weak story, puff it up a bit to appeal to fringe kooks, and before you know it, you may be selling newspapers, but you’re actually hurting people.