Every time this guy opens his mouth, he proves how wrong I can be

Once upon a time, I thought David Silverman was a good guy — a bit aggressive, maybe, with a few weird ideas, but heck, he was going on Fox News to fight the good fight, and he proudly declared himself a feminist. Then he got caught coercing sex from young women, was fired, and now…

I look at him now and wonder how bad a judge of character am I? How did I miss the warning signs? He’s an object lesson in how vulnerable we all are to believing what we want to believe.

By the way, on just the objective facts of the case, Rittenhouse is a gun freak who traveled out-of-state to drop in on a protest and murder a couple of people with a high-powered rifle. He is a murderer. He killed with intent. He’s also probably going to walk because our justice system is a joke, and he got a lunatic as a judge.

Here I am living in The Future, and some of it is such a let-down

Who else remembers watching the western TV series, Death Valley Days, with their grandparents back in the 1960s? It was hosted by Ronald Reagan, and sponsored by 20 Mule Team Borax, a company that sold cleaning products based on sodium tetraborate, which used to be mined in Death Valley, and hauled out by wagons drawn by — you guessed it — 20 mule teams. If only I’d known then what glorious fate the future held for Reagan, and now borax.

Borax is a caustic substance that you can use for cleaning, but also as an insecticide and for unclogging pipes. I haven’t heard of it being used as a floor wax or a dessert topping, at least not yet, but it does have a novel new utility here in the 21st Century…oh god, I also remember watching a show called The 21st Century, hosted by Walter Cronkite, every Sunday at my grandparents’ after church. Walter would tell us all about the technological wonders we’ll see in the 21st century, you know, now, but he missed this one.

A “Dr” Carrie Madej is promoting borax as a method for “undoing” a vaccination.

In a TikTok video that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Dr. Carrie Madej outlined the ingredients for a bath she said will “detox the vaxx” for people who have given into Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

The ingredients in the bath are mostly not harmful, although the supposed benefits attached to them are entirely fictional. Baking soda and epsom salts, she falsely claims, will provide a “radiation detox” to remove radiation Madej falsely believes is activated by the vaccine. Bentonite clay will add a “major pull of poison,” she says, based on a mistaken idea in anti-vaccine communities that toxins can be removed from the body with certain therapies.

Then, she recommends adding in one cup of borax, a cleaning agent that’s been banned as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration, to “take nanotechnologies out of you.”

You know this doesn’t work, right? It’s not going to affect the action of a vaccine, it’s not going extract anything, and it’s not going to “melt” nanotechnologies that aren’t even present in the vaccine. It is going to act as a skin and eye irritant, it could produce unpleasant rashes (that’s a sign that it’s working, I can imagine the quacks saying), and borax exposure has been linked to infertility (See? I told you the vax would make you infertile — I got the jab and then bathed in borax, and now I can’t have babies).

And that’s not all. Now that a majority of the population has been vaccinated, and the dire consequences predicted by the quacks have not come to pass, they are rushing to invent new problems that don’t exist, like vaccine toxins, that they can not cure with bizarre new treatments that don’t work.

Now, some anti-vaccine groups are recommending that people who have been vaccinated should immediately self-administer cupping therapy (an ancient form of alternative medicine that involves creating suction on the skin) to speed up the “removal of the vax content” including first making small incisions on the injection site with a razor. Other memes give instructions on how to “un-inject” shots using syringes.

Any day now we’ll hear that they’re going to be treating vaccination non-problems with black salve or psychic surgery. Mark my words, this is going to be a growth market, given the abundance of stupidity in the population.

Uncle Walter, I am so disappointed in you. You never told us about this future awaiting us.

2,000,000th comment achieved!

The TWO MILLIONTH comment on Pharyngula (caveat: we lost many comments in various moves, so really it’s the two millionth surviving comment — we practice natural selection on our commenters here) has been made. It’s here, and was made by the esteemed Lynna, OM in the Infinite Thread. Congratulations! Good work! Keep it up!

Sorry, I don’t have any prizes. Maybe I can save up for the 3 millionth comment.

Fang you very much!

Aww, this is such a sweet story. An anonymous Australian donor gave up a beautiful pet in order to save lives.

The arachnid has been named Megaspider, and the park says she is roughly twice the size of a typical funnel web spider, more comparable to a tarantula.

The 8cm funnel web spider’s 2cm fangs will be milked for venom that can be turned into antivenom.

The Australian Reptile Park on the New South Wales Central Coast is the only funnel web spider venom milking facility in the country and the antivenom produced there saves up to 300 lives a year, the park says.

Australian Reptile Park’s education officer, Michael Tate, has “never seen a funnel web spider this big”.

“She is unusually large and if we can get the public to hand in more spiders like her, it will only result in more lives being saved due to the huge amount of venom they can produce,” he said.

Call me selfish, but if I found a spider like that I’d be tempted to keep her and coddle her and hug her — OK, maybe no hugging — and keep her forever.

I know all of you want to see this gorgeous beast, so I’ll include a photo below the fold.

[Read more…]

The view from my office window

I don’t think we got a lot of snow last night, but I can’t tell, because these fierce winter winds scour everything bare. Most of the snow that might have fallen in my front yard is probably in the next county.

It might still be snowing, or the wind could just be pushing it around in the air, I don’t know. I’ve been entertained by watching the birds pumping their wings frantically to try and reach this birdfeeder and essentially hovering in place until they tire and the wind whisks them away. Poor birds.

What’s with McMaster University?

They seem to be appallingly slow to respond to accusations of scientific fraud. Last February I wrote about the scandal involving Jonathan Pruitt, a prolific scientist studying spider social behavior, whose collaborators (and there were many) who discovered that the data he contributed to their papers was in some substantial part fabricated. This is a big deal. I’ve been seeing papers cited in the popular press that are tainted by his work. There was a wave of retractions, and the guy hired lawyers to block them, which is just weird, since going to court would have provided more exposure to the evidence — I guess he was just hoping publishers would be too lazy or disinterested in validating the integrity of the research they publish.

Well, now another major strike has been made against Jonathan Pruitt: his Ph.D. has been retracted.

Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.

The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.

Ouch. that implies that his untrustworthy behavior goes all the way back to the earliest days of his career. It also implies that he is unqualified to hold his professorship at McMaster University.

Which he still does! He’s still listed as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior, and he still has a lab web page which lists 9 post-docs and graduate students. Oh, man, I feel for those students — I hope they’ve since landed in better labs. This is the kind of association that can ruin careers.

But now I’m wondering why McMaster isn’t cleaning up this mess. Has Pruitt sicced lawyers on them? This is the kind of thing most universities would be quick to condemn, or at the very least, sweep under the rug. Yet there he still is, virtually at least (physically, he seems to be in Florida), even with a page advertising for new grad students to join his lab. Something is going on. I hope we find out someday. Until then, I’m just going to skip over any papers authored by Pruitt, J.

Uh-oh, it’s snowing

We also have a chance of a blizzard tonight. This is going to limit my mobility even more, I’m afraid, and it’s going to kill more spiders. Scurry deep into the leaf litter, little ones, hide under the rocks, you’re also welcome to move into my house.

Right now it’s pretty and expected. I wonder how long it’ll be until I’m shaking my fist out the window and cussing out the snow?

How to fight climate change in a 3-minute spot on TV

I am deeply impressed with what Michael Mann does here. He gets a good grip on this Australian politician, Barnaby Joyce, doesn’t let go, and makes him squirm while constantly hammering on the importance of addressing climate change. There’s a lot of skill at communication and media messaging on display here for such a short video.

The difficulty in these kinds of exchanges is that the professional politician is adroit at shifting the conversation to what his audience wants to hear — that the government is doing something about the Australian wildfires, and that they prioritize saving money and jobs — but Michael Mann turns that back against him, explaining that the Australian government has a terrible record on environmental issues, and that what they’re not doing is going to cost more than the jobs they vainly try to protect. And he doesn’t let Joyce get away with any lies!

And Mann comes off as a decent fellow while he’s doing it. It’s a hard trick to pull off. It’s why science communicators are important and not as common as we’d like.