Other than the +5 disease resistance, I’ve observed no significant side effects.
That is, other than my voice acquiring a new resonance — I sound like a Decepticon now — and I occasionally emit a kind of warbling screech, like a 1990s modem, which I’m sure will clear up once the nanobots have sufficiently matured and manage to make a connection to my peers. If you’ve got the shot, we ought to try to make a borg-like hookup.
I thought I’d just be getting further protection against a nasty virus, but no…I’m about to become an explorer in the further regions of experience.
Yes, yes, yes! I will gladly become a host to the next stage of our evolution. Fill me up with those sweet exotic alien eggs — I hear the high is incredible.
Whoa, 2.3mm? How big is the needle they are going to use? They might want to inject that IP rather than IM. Or maybe it’s written by some stupid American who has no concept of what millimeters are. Likewise, they seem obsessed with graphene oxide, unaware of how little of this material (it’s used as a carrier for biomolecules and an adjuvant) is actually present in the vaccine. It’s certainly not enough to feed my growing population of macro-sized aluminum-based tripod aliens. Where am I going to get enough graphene oxide to fuel my transformation?
If you’re worried that you might miss out on the alien occupation, don’t. I get my shot at 10:45, and then I plan to wander the streets, infecting random passers-by, strutting about with my new tripod gait — it’ll be a relief, bipedalism is such a downer when one of your legs is crippled up — and touching the community with my shiny new metallic ovipositor.
Come, meld with us, become one with the aliens, and welcome our new millimeters long overlords.
Thomas Friedman is one of the many reasons I do not and will not subscribe to the NY Times — they have way too many assholes granted a sinecure to babble their stupid opinions on one of the more prestigious newspapers in the world, and I guess all we can do is make a little effort to reduce their reputation, one reader at a time. So you’ll have to read his latest stupid column via a link to a site that skims off articles from the NYT.
Anyway, he starts off with classic centrist garbage — you know, both sides are wrong and extremist, therefore we ought to pick something in the middle.
On the one hand, liberal greens will tell you that the world is ending — but that we must not use nuclear power, an abundant source of clean energy, to stave it off. On the other hand, conservative greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that we can’t burden people with a carbon tax or a gasoline tax to slow global warming.
On a third hand, suburban greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that they don’t want any windmills, solar farms or high-speed rail lines in their backyards.
On a fourth hand, most of today’s leaders will tell you that the world is ending, so at Glasgow they’ve all decided to go out on a limb and commit their successors’ successor to deliver emissions-free electricity by 2030, 2040 or 2050 — any date that doesn’t require them to ask their citizens to do anything painful today.
He’s right that the Glasgow meetings were relatively ineffective because they were all about compromise, but isn’t that what Friedman wants? Split the difference, find a middle ground, characterize all environmentalists as wackos? He got what he wanted, so he can’t complain that his very own brand is a failure. His own solution is to further empower technocrats and corporations to engineer us out of the hole the technocrats and corporations have dug us into.
His answer is this turd to make it all worse.
In short: we need a few more Greta Thunbergs and a lot more Elon Musks. That is, more risk-taking innovators converting basic science into tools yet to be imagined to protect the planet for a generation yet to be born.
The only reason we need more Greta Thunbergs is because the Elon Musks have been running amuck. He’s not a “risk-taking innovator” — he’s a billionaire who is busy looting the planet and our economy to fuel his ego. He doesn’t do science! He spends money on whatever gives him a good return on his investment; his fantasy of launching people (not himself, obviously, other people) to Mars is flaming anti-environmentalism.
I am not surprised, though, that Thomas Fucking Friedman worships Musk as his Space Jesus.
Actual portrait of Josh Axe
No, really, I know there are lots of smart people in the South, just as I know there are a lot of stupid people here in the Yankee states (oh boy, do I know). But you’d think the educational institutions in Southern states would know better than to set themselves up as the butt of a joke. Kentucky has a special problem, since they’re home to Answers in Genesis, the Creation “Museum”, and the Ark Park. So what the hell is Kentucky Educational Television doing?
I think I’ll just quote one of those smart Kentuckians, Dan Phelps, on this one.
If someone dies, what will KET say?
Back in August, during a fundraiser, Kentucky EDUCATIONAL Television aired an infomercial for “Dr. Josh Axe” a chiropractor. He touted his version of “ancient remedies.” Every ten seconds or so of his spiel, the camera did a close-up of the grinning/nodding zombies in the audience nodding their heads in total agreement. Some of the things he said concerning diet made sense, but why couldn’t the PBS station get someone reputable to say that? Most of the “ancient remedies” touted seem to based on symbolism. For example:
“Tomatoes have four chambers, just like your heart.”
“Mushrooms are the same shape as adrenal glands”
“Carrots in section look like the eyes iris”
“Walnuts look like brains”
“Celery looks like bones”
“Beets are the color of blood…”
“The color of the food will tell you what part of the body it will heal.”More recently, the website “The Encyclopedia of American Loons” did a nice entry on Axe.
Today I was looking at KET’s schedule and found they are showing more of Axe’s infomercials in late November (see photo).
Why KET? Why? If someone dies, what will KET say?
Rational Wiki also has an entry on Axe. He also has an inordinately popular YouTube channel if you’d rather hear him say stupid things with his own mouth, but since he already has 2 million subscribers I won’t link to it.
By the way, Josh Axe is from Ohio.
I swear, this abomination reads like it was written by a 15 year old sorority girl high on meth, but it’s actually by Boris Johnson’s sister. Really, try reading it — it flits about from topic to topic, from her dog having puppies to prating about her mother’s maiden name to weird complaints about not being sufficiently conservative while saying…
It has been a source of mystery to me and no doubt many others that I manage to host a radio show without landing in the soup more often. I’m always saying things like, ‘But are we allowed to say Liverpool Women’s Hospital any more?’ and ‘I only want to see someone in a surgical face mask in an operating theatre’ and ‘If lockdowns work, why are we having another one and if lockdowns don’t work, why are we having another one?’ But then I realise I am a mere soggy centrist snowflake compared with some.
Don’t worry, strange lady, you’re a right-wing asshole, no question.
And then she drops this on us:
Wow. Humble bragging, name dropping, and casual sympathy for a procurer for a pedophile. I felt like throwing up over everything between the headline and the final line.
She has a radio show and publishes in the Spectator? Man, the United States isn’t the only country parasitized by a colony of superficial twits.
We are so special!
My wife got her COVID booster shot today, and I’m scheduled to get mine tomorrow. Just in time, too, because we just learned of a signal distinction: Minnesota is now the #1 COVID-19 hotspot in the United States! And within Minnesota, the east central and west central regions (where I am) are the very worst areas for COVID hospitalizations and with the lowest vaccination rates!
I’ve mentioned before how lazy and awful the locals here are about wearing a mask. Do you believe me now? I’ve got to get the booster, as well as wear the mask every time I go out, because this place is a plague pit.
In related news, the Department of Defense is now flying in military medical teams to provide relief to overwhelmed health care professionals. Our useless governor, who is more concerned with appeasing the rabid outstate yokels than in preventing citizens from dying, asked them to come in and help, because he sure as hell isn’t going to re-invoke the safety measures, like a mask mandate, that he cancelled months ago.
Help me! I’d like to escape, but I’m stuck here with a Spring teaching load that is going to require that I teach all of my courses in-person, because the university administration is similarly blasé about an ongoing pandemic. FML.
One of those things every lab person knows: label everything. Write down what’s in it, and also the date it was made. At least the person responsible for this followed the rule.
Several vials labeled “smallpox” have been found at a vaccine research facility in Pennsylvania, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
“There is no indication that anyone has been exposed to the small number of frozen vials,” the CDC said in a statement emailed to CNN.
“The frozen vials labeled ‘Smallpox’ were incidentally discovered by a laboratory worker while cleaning out a freezer in a facility that conducts vaccine research in Pennsylvania. CDC, its Administration partners, and law enforcement are investigating the matter and the vials’ contents appear intact,” the CDC added.
“The laboratory worker who discovered the vials was wearing gloves and a face mask. We will provide further details as they are available.”
You don’t need intent to kill us all, when stupidity and neglect is sufficient.
The past few weeks in my cell biology course have been dedicated to an introduction to DNA: structure, replication, and transcription. I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at the students, but I’m ready to move on to other fun stuff, like developmental regulation and evolutionary origins, but I may have to go back and revise everything I said. I neglected to consult the source of all knowledge, Facebook, and there are so many True Facts I failed to communicate.
We know this is truth, because he says it is. Also NOT JOKING. I had no idea that DNA had so much fuel for trans- and homo-phobic interpretations. I’m also always entertained by by folk etymology.
Dioxy-RIB-o-neuclic-acid [sic] is not a reference to ribs. It does refer to a 5-carbon sugar, ribose, that can be extracted from gum arabic, and is related to another sugar, arabinose, that got strangely contracted and mangled by a chemist sometime in the 19th century to “ribose”. It has nothing to do with ribs. In particular, it has nothing to do with the cosmetic surgery of rib shaving, which is done to narrow the waistline of both men and women, but somehow you’ve got to incorporate a raging transphobic obsession into the storytelling.
DNA is also not an acronym for “Dicks N Ass”. It wasn’t named by depraved, sick, and degenerate clowns. That’s a privilege reserved for the people who invent pseudoscience on Facebook. You know, the ones who complain about “sodomy eyebags” and “turbogay”.
What baffles me, though, is that after that silly rant misinterpreting DNA to distort it into support for the author’s weird hatred of gay and trans folk, he announces that DNA is bogus and fake, because it’s found in bullshit things like dinosaurs and apes, and that DNA has nothing to do with heredity. So why is he making up stories about DNA in the first place?
Dang, I got that video out barely in time, because already the satirical wolves are rending the carcass of the University of Austin. There’s going to be nothing left but bleached bones and regret.
I have opinions on this silly University of Austin/UATX nonsense, but I fear the nascent institution is about to become an ex-institution, because its official supporters are rushing to distance themselves from it all. So, before my words become totally obsolete, I put up a video stating my piece.
A year from now, this is going to be a curious artifact of yet another goofy right-wing reach for the straws, and people won’t even remember what UATX was.
Transcript below the fold.
