Cool! Let’s go to Enceladus!

So that’s why aliens in UFOs have been visiting Earth

I fully support exploration of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It’s a complicated body, it’s got frozen water ice, it has oceans of water beneath all that ice, and analysis has shown that it has all the elements essential for life (CHNOPS). Even a biologist would love to know more!

So here’s someone with a plan to get to Enceladus, the Space Ocean Corp. I hate it already. It’s fantasy math.

SPACE OCEAN CORP is a private Texas holding company. Incorporated September 2021. Regulation D 506(C) Unregistered Security Offering. Investor Deck (pdf)

Water is worth $1 Billion per gallon in space (on Mars, on other moons and planet). If a mission to collect it costs $8 Billion; and we’re able to collect just 10 gallons, it can be sold at a $2 Billion net profit. Collect 1,500 to 100,000 gallons, then gross profit is $1.5 Trillion to $100 Trillion.

I’m not an economist, but…isn’t scarcity the reason they’ve invented this imaginary value of $1 Billion per gallon? It’s not really worth that much. No one is paying (or can afford) a billion dollars for a gallon of water. This entire prospectus is built around this magical number as if it is real.

There are over one quadrillion gallons of water on the moon Enceladus. The volume of a sphere of water with a 25 mile deep radius is approximately 72 quadrillion gallons. If we set up a well for $6-$8 Billion, the initial cost to Space Ocean Corp investors will be a drop in the bucket compared to the ROI gain in market cap.

I can multiply numbers together. I can calculate the volume of a sphere. That is not the basis for a complex, high-tech space industry. But they’re using this elementary fact to fish for investors! Stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. Is Peter Thiel available?

They continue. They’ve got a glib Neil deGrasse Tyson quote! That’s worth money, right?

Goal: Extract & Store water from ocean moons. Phase 1) video an ocean on a moon in the solar system. Phase 2) extract water from that moon. Phase 3) sell the water to space companies and organizations. Phase 4) repeat. Phase 5) Video every ocean in the solar system.

“Water in space costs $10,000 per pound to put into orbit … If you can get it there cheaper, that’s a business model.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Future of Colonizing Space- Neil deGrasse Tyson- WGS 2018

Space Ocean Corp and several organizations are partnering up to send a spacecraft to collect water on Enceladus, with the potential to generate a profit of up to $100 Trillion from the initial investment of $8 Billion. Join us!

The ocean on Enceladus is 25 miles deep, making it a valuable source of water in deep space, worth an estimated $1 billion per gallon. We are looking to collect between 1,500 and 100,000 gallons of water from this source and store it on the moon or in orbit, at a Lagrange point, for sale to space organizations.

We’re aiming to launch a private mission to Enceladus, despite the fact that there have been more than 10 government missions already planned for the moon.

By the way, every page on that site has a header with that slogan, Video every ocean in the solar system and store the water, to sustain life in space. It’s in their goals, to video an ocean and to video every ocean in the solar system. I don’t get it. Are they counting on that sweet YouTube money to make them profitable?

I would just ask a simple question: where is that $100 trillion profit coming from? Who is paying that money to Space Ocean Corp? Carolyn Porco (you know, the famous planetary scientist) had that same thought, and asked them about it.

When I asked, ‘What’s your business model?’, they said, ‘Musk’.

What did I tell you? They’re looking for stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. That’s a good choice, except…Musk doesn’t have $100 trillion.

I would love to see Enceladus explored, but one thing this company ignores is that if there is extraterrestrial life there, we would need to be exceedingly careful to avoid contaminating it. I don’t see Space Ocean Corp giving a damn about that — more likely they’d be complaining about the environmentalists wrecking their money-making plan. They are from Texas, after all.

The debate bros are getting wound up again

Here we go again. “Debate me!” shriek the loony antivaxxers; “Why should I,” say the scientists; “That proves you’re wrong,” whine the usual crowd of gullible idiots.

The inciting incident in this case was the king of the fuckin’ online idiots, Joe Rogan, who invited batshit anti-vaxxer loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr onto his show, listened to him respectfully, and then agreed thoroughly with him, to the point of telling respectable and highly qualified scientist Peter Hotez to come on his show and debate him.

Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.

Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.

In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”

Naturally, one of Rogan’s army of cranks showed up at Hotez’s house to taunt him.

A prominent vaccine scientist said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged him to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the weekend.

“I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr.,” Houston-based scientist Peter Hotez tweeted Sunday.

The debate bros were pissed off because Hotez turned Rogan down. Among those debate bros was Elon Musk.

“He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in response to Rogan, who claimed Hotez’s response was a “non answer.”

“I will add $150,000 to @joerogan’s wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted.

Refusing to debate an ideologue does not prove you’re wrong. That’s not how logic works. Upping the ante does not change the problem with debate. The simple fact is that RFK is a deluded kook with a whole battery of bad ideas in his head. He thinks WiFi causes disease, and Rogan agrees.

RFK Jr.: Wifi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Rogan: How does wifi open up your blood-brain barrier?
RFK Jr.: Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise.

Utterly nuts. Bonkers to the nth degree. These two guys might be qualified to operate a public circle-jerk, but they know nothing about the science, so what is to be gained by debating them? That is not a way to resolve any scientific issue. It has always been a problem that glib liars have an automatic edge in debate.

The Sophists highlight the problem with public debates: they are easily gamed with lies, rhetorical skill, and clever wordplay. In order for a debate to actually be worthwhile, both participants must be sincerely dedicated to finding the truth; if one side is not committed to the truth, they will have an advantage, because it is much easier to spout falsehoods than it is to refute them. The technique of spouting too many nonsense points to refute has its own name, called the Gish Gallop, after a young earth creationist who used the technique to criticize evolutionary theory.

The Gish Gallop is effective in live debates largely because the audience does not have enough specialized knowledge to ascertain the validity of a criticism. Science is hard, complicated, and nuanced; when a dishonest debater spouts a dozen nonsensical points, their opponent will not have time to adequately address each of these points. This can give an audience the impression, based simply on the volume of arguments on each side, that the dishonest debater has won the argument.

A live debate is also extremely limited because the participants do not have time to do research to respond to an opponent’s comment. Even experts in a field usually do not have all the relevant data for their field in their head to be recalled at a moment’s notice; again, the Gish Galloper has the advantage here, in that they are usually just providing a list of attacks and are not concerned with accuracy.

Rogan is a dangerous and malicious fraud with a gigantic audience and huge amounts of money, and there he is, spewing all this crap over the body politic, and they’re eating it up. We ought to be terrified. We also not to grant him a millimeter of respect and credibility.

The aliens took over Tucker Carlson’s brain!

Tucker Carlson started a new show on Twitter, of all places. It was ten minutes of Tucker in a barn spouting off conspiracy theories. He has already received a cease-and-desist letter from Fox News, saying he’s under a non-compete agreement.

It’s not going great, in other words.

Here’s his mission. He’s treading on Alex Jones’ toes!

What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money. How did he die? How about JFK and so endlessly on.

Also, he’s more like an Art Bell wanna-be. His big story was this one:

Yesterday, for example, a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.
…
It was clear he was telling the truth. In other words, UFOs are actually real and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know. In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn’t.

He never did have a good handle on the truth.

Goodbye, Tucker. Even if you become popular again, it will be as a crackpot, a joke, a goofball on the fringe that everyone laughs at.

Who keeps putting all these globes everywhere?

Kandiss Taylor ran for governor of Georgia on the slogan, Jesus, Guns, and Babies, which is the perfect Republican mantra. She also promised to execute sheriffs who disobeyed her rules. To everyone’s immense surprise, she lost big time, getting only 3.4% of the vote. Don’t worry, she’s doing the Trump thing and contesting the election, saying it was rigged.

She’s in the news again. She went on a flat-earth podcast to denounce globes.

https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1660677910959730688

Would you believe she has a PhD in counseling and was employed as a guidance counselor at an elementary school for 19 years? I think someone needs to go back and check on those poor kids.

I think we’ve found the perfectly distilled essence of Republicanism, and astoundingly, someone even worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Another example of why I despise Christianity

It leads stupid people like Ray Comfort to say things like this:

The Queen of rock ‘n’ roll passed into eternity today. All the money that Tina Turner possessed, all her fame, all her awards, and accolades now mean nothing. The only thing that matters, is “Were her sins forgiven?”

OK, I forgive her sins. Done.

Maybe better questions to ask when someone dies are: “Did they make the world a better place? Did they create beauty? Did they inspire? Did they speak truth to the world?”

Tina Turner gets a yes to each question. Ray Comfort gets a slow, sad shake of the head.

I think I saw this guy on Dr Strangelove

Michael Flynn (remember him? Former security advisor to Trump, couldn’t keep his mouth shut talking to the Russians, now a QAnon-loving, Christian Nationalist wacko?) has a new grift. He’s one of the founders of a site called 4thePure, which is dedicated to helping people who haven’t been vaccinated. It’s a combination dating site, blood bank, sperm and egg donation site, location for weird webinars with Q creeps, and most importantly, a vector for misinformation. And it only costs $2500 for a lifetime membership, which will give you a 25% discount on overpriced merch (which doesn’t exist yet…coming soon!).

General Jack D. Ripper is real! Now I’m worried about the Doomsday Machine.

I think Kat Abu is too young to make the Dr Strangelove connection.

Poor Peterson, beset on all sides

I’ve said before that Jordan Peterson is a bad biologist, not any kind of biologist at all, and especially not an evolutionary biologist. When someone knowledgeable in the field looks at his expertise, he’s not even a good clinical psychologist. What, exactly, is he supposed to be good at? We can definitely say it sure isn’t ancient languages and the Bible.

…I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them.

Peterson frequently makes etymological arguments, which I’ve always found silly and are typically used creatively by know-nothings to make rhetorical points. Fake etymologies are common on the internet. The annoying thing about Peterson is that he uses them to sound “scholarly,” but he’s using them in bizarre ways.

By the way, sin. There’s two derivations of the word sin: one is chet, which is from the Hebrew, and the other is hamartia, from the Greek. And they both are archery terms that mean to miss the target.

And then he goes on to babble about sports arenas and crowds and I don’t know what, all while gesturing madly. It’s weird display. Very cringe.

But he’s getting everything wrong! Not that that would slow him down in the slightest.

In these few short sentences, Peterson has already made three serious errors. First, he mispronounces the Hebrew word חֵטְא (ḥeṭʾ)—a noun derived from the verbal root ח־ט־א (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ)—as /t͡ʃɛt/ (pronouncing the ⟨ḥ⟩ at the beginning like the ⟨ch⟩ in cheese) when it should actually be pronounced /χɛt/. This is a pronunciation mistake that no one who actually knows anything about Hebrew would make, since the sound /t͡ʃ/ does not exist in ancient or modern Hebrew. By mispronouncing the word in this blatant manner, Peterson clearly demonstrates that he does not even know the Hebrew alphabet.

Second, Peterson claims that these words are “derivations of the word sin,” but this is factually incorrect. Neither of these words is the etymological root of the English word sin; instead, they are ancient Hebrew and Greek words that occur in the texts of the Bible that modern translators normally render into English as the word sin because translators have decided (whether rightly or wrongly) that sin is the closest English equivalent of these terms.

Etymologically speaking, the English word sin actually derives from the Middle English word sinne, which derives from the Old English word synn, which derives from the Proto-West Germanic word *sunnju, meaning “responsibility,” “care,” “worry,” or “need.” This word, in turn, derives from the Proto-Germanic word *sunjō, meaning “truth.” This, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁sónts, meaning “a thing which exists or is true,” which is the active participle of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h₁es-, meaning “to be.”

Third and finally, Peterson claims that both the Hebrew word ḥeṭʾ and the Greek word ἁμαρτία are “archery terms,” but this is only partly true. It is true that ancient texts do use both of these words to refer to when a person shoots an arrow or throws a spear and misses their intended target. Nonetheless, ancient texts also use both of these words in a much more general sense to refer to any kind of mistake or failure that a person makes. In fact, some of the earliest attested occurrences of the word ἁμαρτάνω use it in this more general sense to mean simply “make a mistake.”

I’ll take the author’s word for it all, but using a tenuous link between sin and archery is already ridiculous. It’s an unwarranted extrapolation and interpretation, even if the etymology were correct. It’s like if I were talking about developmental biology, using technical terms we take for granted, like “competence” and “induction” and “determination,” and used a dictionary to declare that we thought embryos were self-willed intelligent beings. No, it’s more that embryologists in the 1920s were enamored with psychology and were borrowing terms to apply to concepts that had absolutely nothing to do with minds.

Peterson is that clueless nerd with a dictionary making stuff up to justify his conclusions.

Florida. Charter school. Principal a fan of Elon Musk. Need I say more?

This is not the person you want running your school.

A Florida principal resigned during an impassioned school board meeting on Tuesday, after it was revealed she tried to send $100,000 from the school’s account to a scammer posing as Elon Musk.

Jan McGee – the principal of Burns Science and Technology charter school in Oak Hill – claimed she spent months talking to a man online who was pretending to be the richest man on Earth, NBC affiliate WESH reports.

McGee was reportedly trying to net a multi-million dollar donation in the school, in exchange for a $100,000 check. Thankfully, the school’s business manager cancelled the check before it could be cashed.

The principal was repeatedly told she was speaking to a scammer, according to other administrators at the meeting. School staff members also pointed out other issues they have with McGee and accused her of fostering a toxic work environment.

McGee resigned after multiple staff members said they refused to work for her any longer, according to WESH.

If I really wanted to be a con artist, I would definitely move to Florida.

Degenerates!

Men these days have decayed from the power and virility of their forebears. Think of those mountain men who’d go off into the wilderness alone and hunt and fish and trap and live off the land, to return after months or years with a sledge loaded with valuable animal pelts. They were awesomely self-sufficient. We have degraded over time, to the point where some men are little more than weak parasites on society who depend on others to tend to their frail, fragile selves and pathetic needs.

I speak, of course, of American conservatives.

These smug, self-satisfied little ‘men’ chortle and laugh as they’re asked if they would rather do dishes or laundry…and admit with an air of pride that they don’t do either. Not only are they ineffectual and incapable, they are vain about their deficiencies. It makes them a special elite, I guess.

Listen. It makes them spineless atavisms.

Here’s what a real man should be able to do:

  • Cook a healthy meal.
  • Clean up after themselves.
  • Maintain their clothing and their home.
  • Sew a button.
  • Humanely remove a spider from a room without squealing.
  • Change a diaper.
  • Have a relationship with a partner, not a servant.
  • Call their mother.
  • Cry when appropriate.

(This is what a real woman should be able to do, too, so maybe it’s a list of what real humans do.)

These guys have gone from whining about “stand up straight” and “clean your room” to bragging about their incompetence at elementary chores. I do all those things, including washing dishes and doing laundry, and I’m a wokefied candy-ass liberal who uses pronouns.

On the bright side, American conservatives are on the road to extinction.