Next Sunday, 25 July, at 11am Central I’ll sit me down in front of a camera and ramble on. You can ask me questions, I might answer them. If you don’t ask me questions, I thought I’d chat about Stephen J. Gould, who seems to have more people whining about him lately. Either way, it’ll be fun!
Fuck all these dudes.
Break out the party hats, the millionaire who funded so much evil and misinformation in the world has kicked the bucket, finally.
William H. Regnery II, a racist, reclusive multimillionaire who used his inherited fortune to finance vile white supremacist groups in the hopes of one day forming an American whites-only ethnostate, died earlier this month, his family and associates confirmed. He was 80 years old.
Regnery, whose family amassed riches from its right-wing publishing empire, died on July 2 in Florida after a “long battle with cancer,” his cousin Alfred, the former head of Regnery Publishing, confirmed to HuffPost.
I wouldn’t normally say this about a cancer victim, but jesus, I hope he suffered. He’s the lunatic with a fortune and a printing press who has been bankrolling creationists and fascists for decades. He gets a lengthy obit in the NY Times, the SPLC does a better job. This is the man who founded the National Policy Institute, if you like your Nazis with an innocuous title, and the Occidental Quarterly, if you want your racist pseudoscience dressed up as a pretend science journal.
I’d like to dream that the poison he injected into the nation will rot with his corpse, but I suspect there will be a new snake slithering into his place and his money.
I could have told you months ago that this was going to happen. Thanks to the right-wing propaganda networks and the gullibility of the American citizen, the pandemic is coming back.
Federal health officials sounded an alarm Friday about a surge in U.S. coronavirus infections fueled by the twin threats posed by the highly transmissible delta variant and a stagnation in efforts to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.
During a White House briefing, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the seven-day average of coronavirus infections soared nearly 70 percent in just one week, to about 26,300 cases a day. The seven-day average for hospitalizations has increased, too, climbing about 36 percent from the previous seven-day period, she said.
“There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Walensky said. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk, and communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well.”
Imagine your community is threatened by a brush fire. Everyone rushes to put it out; they spend a whole bunch of money on fire-fighting equipment. They get it mostly extinguished, there are just some smoldering coals left on the ground, and at that point we all say, “That’s taken care of, everyone go home, take it easy.” The next day, the neighborhood is burning again. Carl’s house burns down. We’re all sorry about Carl, but the fire is out, mostly, a few embers still smoking over by the gas station, but hey, this new fire extinguisher we bought is too heavy to haul over there to put it out completely, let’s just give up.
Maybe it’ll go out on its own. There couldn’t possibly be an explosion of flames that destroys the whole town. We’ll deal with it then, if we absolutely must.
When will we realize that it’s going to take a consistent, sustained effort to tamp this problem down? Nah, it’s too hard, probably never.
Oh,look. Florida leads the way.
About two weeks after Florida health officials discontinued publicly reporting some data and stopped issuing their daily COVID-19 summaries detailing cases, test positivity and vaccinations, some researchers remain concerned that the moves were made too early.
Even as the pandemic wanes, scientists such as Jennifer Nuzzo, a leading epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, say that state health departments should be presenting more data, not less, while the medical and science communities continue to gauge the effectiveness of a still-fresh vaccination campaign.
“It feels like we’re running a marathon and we’re almost giving up a couple miles from the finish line,” Nuzzo said in an interview with the Miami Herald.
Did you know 20% of the new cases in the US are in Florida?
They’re old. The reason that they’re not as craggy and tall as the Rockies or the Himalayas or even the Cascades is because they’ve been eroding for 480 million years. Follow this Twitter thread for an entertaining geology lesson.
Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains?
The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. 🧵— Alex (he/him) is fighting for trans kids ⚧🏳️⚧️ (@AlexPetrovnia) July 15, 2021
If only the rest of Twitter could be that informative!
There are a thousand stories in that mob of insufferable insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on 6 January. This is one of them.
The picture ought to be enough, but I’ll fill in a few details. That’s a guy dressed up as Captain Moroni, a figure from the Book of Mormon. His flag reads, IN MEMORY OF OUR GOD, OUR RELIGION, AND FREEDOM, AND OUR PEACE, OUR WIVES, AND OUR CHILDREN. ALMA 46:12
. The FBI had absolutely no problem tracking this absurd wanker down, and he has been arrested. His real name is Nathan Wayne Entrekin. He bragged about showing up in costume, and despite the flag blustering about his wives, he also recorded video on his phone addressing his mother.
I made it Mom. I made it to the top. Mom, look, I made it to the top, to the top here. Look at all the patriots here. Haha, if I can make it up that, anybody can. [laughs] Oh man. Look at all the patriots here. Patriots, patriots, patriots. Look at all the people, Mom. Look at all that down there. And the monuments over there, way over there. I gotta catch my breath here. Sorry. Haha.
[yelling to an unseen protester] Captain Moroni! Same fight, same place, different time. 76 B.C.!
I’m here for Trump. Four more years, Donald Trump! Our rightful president! I made it to the relative top, anyway. Oh my gosh, how many of us are here? Must be like, millions. Couple million, maybe. I keep running into trees, though. I gotta get this first, though, before my costume falls off me. Check this out, Mom. All those people.
Being raised in religion doesn’t help one distinguish fact from fiction, does it? The Book of Mormon was a fantasy story scribbled up by a 19th century con artist, and Captain Moroni has about as much basis in reality as Captain America or Captain Marvel or Captain Planet or Captain Caveman or Captain Underpants.
Of course, he also parrots the racist bullshit the Mormons have always believed.
I am Captain Moroni. I am the William Wallace of the Book of Mormon. In the Book of Alma of the Book of Mormon, a freedom fighter named Captain Moroni fought for his freedom against the King-Men. He was a Freeman, part of the Freemen movement. And around, I like to say 76 B.C. because 1776 sounds so—is so popular—but before Christ came to Jerusalem, in this land, the Book of Mormon is about this land, right? The same fight for freedom, this land, the same land, right here, upon which we stand, the native American Indians they have Jewish DNA, descent. I can tell you about, you can Google that, the Algonquin Indians have Native American, have, uh, Jewish descent in their DNA, there’s evidence of the Book of Mormon. I don’t want to get too much into that. I’m here for freedom. You’re here for freedom. Captain Moroni ripped his coat and he wrote this message right here. And if I can get it open, it says …
The rioters weren’t sending their best. But then, we knew that all along.
While all the headlines have been about the ego-trips of a trio of billionaires, it seems I failed to notice the substantive plans of an international coalition of space agencies. They have some ambitious goals for the coming decade.
Among the different initiatives:
- The first launch of the SLS is slated for this year, with a human landing on the moon earmarked for 2024. NASA has christened this new wave of lunar exploration its Artemis program.
- Russia and China have recently announced a similar collaborative effort. They plan to build the International Lunar Research Station somewhere on the moon. The hope is to have human visitors by the mid-2030s.
- The European Space Agency (ESA) has started Project Moonlight, an effort to build a constellation of satellites around the moon for navigation and communications.
Some observers have spoken of a “second space race” pitting the United States against China and Russia.
“I think that’s alarmist rhetoric; it has a lot of baggage,” says Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “The previous space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was an outright competition about being first. Now, it’s … about who’s going to have the best coalition of countries.”
The Artemis program seeks to lay down guiding principles for the civil exploration and use of space, starting with the moon but extending to Mars, asteroids, and comets. To date, 12 countries have embraced the Artemis Accords.
Russia and China, meanwhile, are inviting international partners to join them in their moon-base project.
Let the rich boys play with their toys — or rather, don’t, tax the space dilettantes and make them stop their stupid efforts at putting their stupid dicks into brief spurts of parabolic flight. This is the real deal: taking the effort to build scientific infrastructure in space, which could be a useful foundation for more science. Cooperative efforts by multiple nations to do science? Yes, please. I could support that. I think in the long run Space Socialism will be better and more productive than the current Space Capitalism. I will also be impressed if humans return to the Moon in — checks calendar — just two years? For real? Make it so.
Unfortunately, I do have some reservations, ala Gil Scott-Heron.
Francis Becenti
I have to temper that concern with the statement that all of science is a kind of luxury, an investment in long-term thinking, and you can always make a legitimate argument that we have more pressing problems to spend our money on. However, I also believe that it’s a worthy goal if it is done equitably, if all people have the opportunity to participate, and if the benefits are spread far and wide, rather than being a big funnel to drain more money into the pockets of the already wealthy, or an excuse for billionaires to mug for the camera.
I’ve been under medication for high blood pressure for over a decade now, and it works — my blood pressure has been under control and in the normal range ever since. Except…at my last checkup on Tuesday. Now it’s down around 100/60, which is getting down in the hypotensive range. I suspect it’s a combination of aging and all the hot weather causing some dehydration. I’m feeling a bit strange, though.
The doctor warned me to watch out for faintness or light-headedness when rising up to stand, and what do you know, this morning I briefly felt like I was going to pass out when I stood up. Now I have to worry about something novel: I’ve been carrying around nitroglycerin all these years, never had to use it, it just crumbles to dust in the bottle and I have to get a fresh stock every six months or so, just in case. I’m afraid now that if I faint somewhere, someone will shout, “It’s his heart!”, fumble through my pockets for medication, and then give me a potent vasodilator. Yay. Of all the things that are going to kill me, hypotension wasn’t high on the list.
My doctor is going to revise my medications and dial down the blood pressure stuff. Reducing the number of pills I have to take every day will be a nice change.
Also, my bad cholesterol is way way down, and I cut my triglycerides in half, which I attribute to living on a vegetarian/Mediterranean diet for the last year. That means I get to eat all the ice cream and cookies that I want now. Right? That’s how it works, I think. Big scoop of lard on a sugar cone, maybe, sprinkled with Pixie Sticks dust.
The magic fly wings are back. I got this email yesterday:
Dear doctor Myers,
I’ve read your old article on the study about a saying of Muhammad that advised people to dip a fly if it landed on their drinks. Recently I’ve found an article (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jnsv/66/Supplement/66_S283/_pdf) which honestly seems to me even more unscientific, but there is one thing that I don’t understand that I hope you may clarify. The fact is that this study doesn’t seem to have been published in a predatory journal, I’ve searched the journal and the publisher but I haven’t find them on the predatory publishing list. Maybe it is because the journal is Japanese(I’ve read articles about how many Indonesian studies were published in predatory journal but nothing about this specific publisher). By the way I’ve done a bit of research on this study and I found something which convinces me even more of my first thoughts, but I don’t have enough knowledge to debunk the study itself.In the paper they quote 4 studies to support their claims:
-Reference number 9 was published on a predatory journal (called IDOSI).
-Reference number 7 is the experiment at Qassim University which you have talked about.
-References number 10 come from a book about miracles of the Quran, that was originally in Arabic and was later translated in Indonesian. It supposedly quotes a study from this book but since I don’t know the languages I don’t know how to search. But the fact that it quotes just the book and not the supposed study is very suspicious.
-Reference number 11 is from something in Indonesian language about “miracles” of the hadiths, I couldn’t find anything like this and the only other source where this is cited is from a larger paper (also in Indonesian)of the same author of this study, which basically talks about the same things.
All the sources are islamic, the study itself was done in a islamic university in Indonesia specialized in islamic teachings, probably by undergrad students of the nutrition faculty.As I’ve said the only thing that I don’t understand is why this study was published on a non predatory journal, and I can’t refute it by myself. I hope you may give your opinion on this paper.
Here’s my article that they reference. The point being made on the basis of an Islamic hadith, If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for the one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure of the disease, is that the left wings of flies are dirty and full of bacteria, but the right wings have strong antibiotic properties. Only the right wing, mind you! This is from a book compiled in the 9th century, so it’s a remarkable assertion that was made without any application of scientific observation or empirical data collection — just poof, the idea came out of the mouth of some sage.
This, unfortunately, is the abstract for the new paper in question:
It’s a very badly written paper, like the work of a lazy undergraduate; of course, we also have to consider that this was written by an Indonesian student in English, not their native language. Still, it’s a naive bit of work that was done with little effort in the course of a few days that were somehow stretched out over 6 months.
It’s a simple experiment. Snip the wings off flies, dip them in water…wait, the protocol is weird. They have a negative control, water contaminated with E. coli, and a positive control, sterile water, (I feel like they labeled those backwards) but then they only test the right wings of flies dipped in contaminated water. This is peculiar, because they never test the left wings, despite the fact that this is a five-minute experiment that is then cultured on a petri dish for two days, with the assay consisting of simply counting colonies on the dish, and they only did it twice, with the only variable being the number (1, 2, or 3) of right wings they used. That’s it! And they published it!
You want to see the results? OK, here they are in all their glory.
I spent way too much time puzzling over this for such a garbage paper. There are five sets of data, but only two lines on the chart; the blue line goes up over time, but the legend says blue is either one right wing or the negative control (which is the water contaminated with E. coli), the orange is the positive control (the sterile water), which is flatlined as you might expect. There is no observable data for the different numbers of wings. In the text they state that the number of wings didn’t matter — all two of the measurements for one, two, or three wings showed no colony growth. They don’t even do a comparison of left and right wings, which is the heart of their claim about the accuracy of Islam.
It’s remarkably trivial and bad, and it’s little more than a grade school science fair experiment. And it got published.
To address my correspondent’s questions:
(although, really, that title would make me question it), you have to consider each paper’s ideas. A journal like Nature has a rather more demanding filter than J Sci Nutr Vitaminol, obviously; that latter seems to be more of a wide open sphincter than any kind of filter.
Also, an article that in its introduction mentions that the idea they’re testing is contrary to the facts in the field
, but that Muslims must still believe and be sure of the truth of the hadith
is setting up a bias which demands a significantly more robust set of observations than this half-assed lazy casual “experiment”. If they are making a radical claim that defies all the observations and theories current in the field, they damn well better put in the work!
The Circle of Nations Indigenous Association put out a call to search our campus for graves a month ago.
June 14. 2021
CW: Indian Boarding Schools, Historical Trauma, Cultural Genocide.
Circle of Nations Indigenous Association calls upon UMN Morris to make immediate plans to search for unmarked gravesites of children buried on/near our present-day campus.
How many colleges in America have 2-7 murdered children buried underneath their campuses? How many colleges have gone decades without intending to search for these remains and return them to their families? These circumstances are unacceptable.
Since 2019, UMN Morris has committed to a policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our campus’s history. We believe honoring this commitment is impossible without searching for these children and returning them to their homes, so that their spirits and their kinships may heal as well.
We are thankful for the University’s decision to cooperate with the Department of Interior’s review of federal Indian boarding schools. However, it would be more appropriate if the university led the search itself, with constant, close collaboration from tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the United States federal government.
Search the School.
Circle of Nations Indigenous Association
Our student leaders seconded that suggestion.
There is a petition.
The University of Minnesota-Morris has a moral obligation to make immediate plans to search the school for the unmarked burial sites of the 2-7 Indian boarding school victims. These children must then be returned to their home communities so their spirits and families can heal.
This is an essential action step towards fulfilling UMN Morris’s policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our institution’s history as a former Indian boarding school.
In June 2021, outgoing Chancellor Michelle Behr announced the University’s willingness to cooperate with the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
However, we prefer that the search be conducted by an Indigenous ground-penetrating radar specialist, in constant collaboration with tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the federal government – an institution responsible for destructive policies towards Native American people, including Indian boarding schools.
I assume that number of 2-7 comes from some historical evidence. I hope it isn’t more. If there are unmarked graves on or near campus, I agree that we have an obligation to find them.
