This book looks so bad, I want to read it: Evolution is Wrong, by Erich von Däniken.
I saw some quotes. This one is so stupid it might cure my temptation.
I shouldn’t read this book, Erich is the one who needs to do some reading.
A chiropractor who also has a master’s degree in immunology is in trouble because she posted an op-ed that favored vaccines.
The article she posted by the New York Times was titled “Underselling the Vaccine” and described how experts were being overly cautious when reporting their success rate.
With a master’s degree in immunology, Weiss thought the article was interesting and wanted to pass it along to her many Facebook friends, which include immunologists and scientists, she told CBC News.
A fellow chiropractor — whose identity remains a secret to this day — saw it and reported her to the Manitoba Chiropractors Association, the regulatory body for her profession.
Apparently, some chiropractors believe in an evidence-based approach (then why are they still chiropractors, I wonder?) and others believe in subluxation, which is garbage pseudoscience.
At the core of this divide in the profession is subluxation — a diagnosis used by some chiropractors to measure the health of someone’s spine.
If someone has a “subluxation-free spine,” there are some in the profession who believe that you don’t need vaccines or other medical interventions, explained Brian Gleberzon, a Toronto-based chiropractor and former professor at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College.
“This would be a very traditional belief, and they would hearken back to the developers of the profession,” he said.
The subluxationists are out for Carolyn Weiss’s (the offending believer in vaccinations) blood, sending cease-and-desist letters and demanding the her op-eds be removed and threatening her license to practice chiropractic. They’re kind of nuts. They police what members say on the net.
It led to the association subscribing to a web scraper tool in 2021 that crawls through the professional websites and social media accounts of chiropractors and flags keywords such as “vaccines.”
The word “evidence-based,” “principled,” “honest,” and “ethical” were also flagged, as the association felt they could be used to make one chiropractor appear superior to another, according to an undated memo from the association to chiropractors obtained by CBC News.
The chiropractic association even has a rule that you can’t discuss vaccination because it is not within the scope of chiropractic practice.
Well, yeah. But nothing medical is within the scope of chiropractic. I agree that chiropractors shouldn’t be dispensing any medical advice, any more than I should, but they are silencing this one thing for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve never understood why people go to chiropractors — I suspect it’s because they’re cheaper than real physical therapy, they’re desperate for relief from chronic pain (and haven’t discovered opioid abuse yet), and chiropractors make wild promises. We have a quack here in Morris who implied that his chiropractic shop would help cure cancer — he seems to have adopted a lower profile since I highlighted his sleaze.
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.
Lawrence Krauss, of all people, defended Geoff Marcy on the pages of Quillette last week.
Well, that’s a sentence that probably killed all further interest.
That Richard Dawkins then waded in to accuse people who oppose the abuses of power of being pathetic, posturing little wimps
probably doesn’t help.
I went ahead and barreled right in, and even compared their defense of sexism to the revelations that emerged from the recent documentary, Secrets of Hillsong. The good ol’ boy network is often deployed in the name of god, but sometimes it’s fired up in the name of science.
Transcript coming up!
She’s a doctor, she must know all the inner secrets! Except…she’s not a real doctor. She’s a chiropractor.
I don’t think I’ll need to change anything about what I teach.
American Idiot
You may have heard that the state of Florida banned a poem by Amanda Gorman from grade school libraries. What’s chilling is that this was triggered by one person complaining, a woman named Daily Salinas. She is a real piece of work.
In a series of screenshots tweeted by the group Miami Against Fascism, Salinas appears to be photographed in several Proud Boys events. In one photo, Salinas appears to be standing next to Enrique Tarrio, the far-right group’s neo-fascist leader who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy last month. “Freedom to choose,” said Salinas’s T-shirt.
In another post that featured a picture of Tarrio, Salinas appeared to hail the Proud Boys, writing, “Los mejores,” or “The best” in Spanish, adding, “My Proud boys,” alongside emojis of the American flag, a heart, a flexed arm and prayer hands.
Miami Against Fascism also posted pictures of Salinas’s apparent involvement with CCDF, also known as County Citizens Defending Freedom USA, a controversial Christian nationalist organization.
The outlet Jewish Telegraphic Agency also reviewed a Facebook account that appeared to be Salinas’s. The account featured a series of rightwing and antisemitic posts, including one about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated Russian antisemitic text originally published in 1903 about a purported Jewish plan to dominate the world.
According to JTA, the post about the Protocols showed a list of steps on how “Jewish Zionists” would dominate the world.
Not only is she a bigot, she is a nearly illiterate dumbass.
“I see the word ‘communism’, and I think it’s something about communism,” she told JTA, adding, “I didn’t read the words.”
Salinas added that she is Christian, has Jewish friends and enjoys watching the Israeli Netflix series Fauda.
She also revealed that she only read snippets of the books that she sought to ban at the education center. The books include The ABCs of Black History, poetry by Langston Hughes and books on Cuba, all of which she has criticized for “indirect hate messages”, references to critical race theory and gender indoctrination.
“They have to read for me because I’m not an expert,” Salinas told JTA. “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.”
The state of Florida allows an idiot who doesn’t read to dictate the contents of school libraries.
Maybe they should only accept criticisms of books from people who pass a test of basic literacy and who can actually demonstrate that they read and understood the whole book in question. But that would be un-American!
Blood is life, you know. That’s been the lesson from science documentaries like Dracula and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Remember creepy weird Bryan Johnson, the middle-aged Silicon Valley techbro who want to live forever by gobbling down lots of supplements, slathering on the skin creams, and eating a strangely specific diet? Now he has decided that vampirism is the answer.
An anti-aging zealot who spends $2 million a year in a quest to turn back time has dragged his teenage son into being his personal “blood boy.”
Bryan Johnson, the 45-year-old tech tycoon who wants to keep his internal organs, including his penis and rectum, functioning youthfully — enlisted 17-year-old Talmage to provide blood transfusions, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
At a clinic near Dallas last month, Johnson, his 70-year-old dad, Richard, and Talmage showed up for an hours-long, tri-generational blood-swapping treatment, the outlet reported.
Johnson usually receives plasma from an anonymous donor, but this time Talmage provided a liter of his blood, which was converted into batches of piece parts — a batch of liquid plasma and another of red and white blood cells and platelets.
Ugh. This is creepy child abuse — although they did it in Texas, where they hate children, so he’ll probably get away with it. Even if this worked, I wouldn’t ask my children to ever do this for me.
I also notice the icky Elizabeth Holmes-style pose. It’s all quackery.
My wife was working in the garden this morning, while I was vegetating in front of the computer. One of the things Mary does is listen and fire up Merlin Bird ID as she works — paying attention to bird song is supposed to be good for you, you know. This is what she identified in our back yard this morning: Chipping Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, House Finch, Black-capped Chickadee, Common Grackle, Rock Pigeon, Grey Catbird, American Crow, American Robin, Northern Cardinal, White-breasted Nuthatch, Red-eyed Vireo, Willow Flycatcher, Alder Flycatcher, Blue Jay, Common Raven, Eastern Towhee, Black-and-White Warbler, Philadelphia Vireo, House Sparrow, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Great Crested Flycatcher, Great Horned Owl, European Starling, Eastern Phoebe, House Wren, American Goldfinch, Downy Woodpecker, Chimney Swift, Dickcissel, American Redstart, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Mourning Dove, Yellow-rumped warbler, Cedar Waxwing, and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher.
I thought she made up “Dickcissel,” but apparently it’s a real bird living in the Midwest. I know we’ve got owls in the neighborhood, and also hawks, since this is clearly a great feeding ground.
This does explain why I’m getting up early every morning — the cacophony is tremendous around here.
I was wondering what Neuralink is good for — it must be for treating some serious medical condition, since it involves serious surgery. But no! It’s just techdude fantasies.
Neuralink’s BCI will require patients to undergo invasive brain surgery. Its system centers around the Link, a small circular implant that processes and translates neural signals. The Link is connected to a series of thin, flexible threads inserted directly into the brain tissue where they detect neural signals.
Patients with Neuralink devices will learn to control it using the Neuralink app. Patients will then be able to control external mice and keyboards through a Bluetooth connection, according to the company’s website.
An app. Bluetooth. Controlling computer mice.
It absolutely did not help that I am currently using a computer mouse, a cheap wired optical mouse, that has an intermittent fault. Every once in a while, but not often enough to motivate me to get a replacement, the LED cuts out and the buttons stop responding. The fix is to shake the cable or unplug and re-insert the USB cable. It’s a bit annoying, I really should just get a new mouse, they’re only about $7.
But now imagine that your Neuralink device has a less than perfect connection: scar tissue builds up, an electrode gets jostled out of position. Every once in a while, the app drops the Bluetooth connection. The artificial limb you’re controlling becomes unresponsive, or even worse, you miss a kill shot in Call of Duty (worse, because I’ve seen how gamers can explode in fury at the most trivial stuff). There’s no easy cable-jiggling you can do, you’re going in for major brain surgery.
Or more likely, you’ll make do as I am with my mouse…you let it slide, 99% function is good enough. The only thing is, your brain doesn’t like wires stuck in it — there will be a gradual accumulation of scar tissue and localized damage, the performance of the device will inevitably incrementally deteriorate, and Neuralink doesn’t have a good replacement strategy.
“Right to repair” acquires a new urgency when it’s a gadget imbedded in your brain. Musk doesn’t seem the type to allow outsourcing of his profitable toy, and is probably anticipating making lots of money from obsolescence.
Has anybody read The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton? It’s about a man who gets a brain implant to correct his epilepsy, but then it starts triggering increasingly violent crimes. I strongly dislike everything Crichton ever wrote — he was a Luddite who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, while the press and the public fawn over his bad science — but for the first time, I feel like he might have been onto something.
Reportedly, Elon Musk has gotten FDA approval to stick chronic electrodes into people’s brains. Why you’d want anything associated with that incompetent boob permanently wired into your brain is a mystery.
The FDA acknowledged in a statement that the agency cleared Neuralink to use its brain implant and surgical robot for trials on patients but declined to provide more details.
Neuralink and Musk did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
The story has triggered my internal Michael Crichton and now I’m wondering what horror will result from this decision.
My imagination fails. You’ll have to think of all the likely horrible consequences of getting a Neuralink implant.
