I do not think that word means what you think it means

Jordan Klepper continues his journey among the vaccine deniers and MAGAheads. He went to meetings of local school boards which have become the new focal point of the anti-maskers who have been using the public comments portion of the meetings to vent their feverish conspiracy theories. I linked to a compilation of those comments recently.

One of the things I noticed in the Klepper video below is that a couple of the people rationalized their weird beliefs by saying that they had done ‘research’ on it. They seem to think that the scientific-sounding word ‘research’ means finding some sources on the internet that support their beliefs, rather than an evaluation of actual research results supported by empirical data that has been done and carefully analyzed by credible experts.

The new slogan of those opposed to any anti-Covid 19 measures for children that are mandated by the government seems to be “I don’t co-parent with the government”.

I did learn something new, and that is that Satanist rituals involve people wearing masks and standing six feet apart from each other. What more evidence do you need that masks and physical distancing are evil? Wake up, sheeple!

‘Blessed’ water does not prevent Covid-19

Thanks to blog readers Donnie B. and Brian, I learned that a Sri Lankan who claimed that he had a way to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus by using water that he had ‘blessed’, has died from the disease. He had received support from several high profile figures, including the prime minister who is also a former president.

A high-profile shaman who tried to end Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 outbreak with “blessed” water has died of the virus, according to his family.

Eliyantha White, 48, who treated sports stars and top politicians, including the country’s prime minister, claimed in November he could end the pandemic in Sri Lanka and neighbouring India by pouring pots of his “blessed” water into rivers.

Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi endorsed the water treatment, but was infected two months later and ended up in a hospital intensive care unit.

She was later demoted and lost her portfolio, but remains in the cabinet.

White attracted international attention in 2010 when legendary Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar publicly thanked him for treating a knee injury, saying it helped him hit the first-ever one-day international double century against South Africa.
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Pandemic paradox: Less driving, more traffic deaths

Accidents involving cars are one of the biggest sources of deaths in the US. The last year has seen a seeming paradox. While the pandemic resulted in fewer cars on the road and fewer miles driven the number of traffic-related accident fatalities actually increased.

It’s a public health crisis in any year, and somehow, the pandemic has only made it more acute. Even as Americans have been driving less in the past year or so, car crash deaths (including both occupants of vehicles and pedestrians) have surged.

Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths.
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Light at the end of the pandemic tunnel?

Sometimes it seems like this pandemic will never end. We have been teased in the past that things were looking up, especially early in the summer when vaccinations were being rolled out and the numbers of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths started decreasing. But then the Delta variant kicked in and we went back into mask-wearing, physical-distancing, and hunker-down mode. Or at least some of us did.

But now a respected team of scientists who form the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the worst really may be over and that their models, under varying conditions, predict that we should start to see declines lasting all the way through March of 2022.

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The scandal of food waste in the US

I was brought up with enough food to eat but wasting was severely frowned upon. You served on your plate what you thought you needed and then ate all of it. That was not an uncommon practice in Sri Lanka and I suspect in many developing countries. That habit has persisted throughout my life so that to this day I almost never throw any food away. Whatever is bought is cooked and eaten. It is a bit of a joke in my family that I will eat food even if it has just started going bad. If cheese is getting moldy, I will cut out the spoilt part and eat the rest. The same with fruits. I ignore the sell-by date and only throw something away if it smells bad or is obviously rotten. I would save even the tiniest amount of leftover food after a meal, put it in the fridge, and then mix it into an omelette or something later and eat it. I actually find such ‘savory’ omelettes very tasty.
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How many steps a day should one take?

I wrote last year that the popular prescription that one should walk 10,000 steps a day in order to obtain the health benefits of activity originated as an advertising and marketing scheme and had no scientific basis. Research suggested that one did not need so many steps to get the benefit. But how many would be desirable?

This article summarizes some of the recent recommendations.
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The curious history of polywater

One of the more curious incidents in science history is ‘polywater’. The existence of polywater was suggested by a Russian scientist Nikolai Fedyakin in the early 1960s and gained ground as other people also seemed to be able to detect physical properties in certain samples of water that were not present in others, suggesting that a new state of water had been created. Of course, we know that water can be in different states such as ice and steam but what was new was that polywater was a different kind of liquid water.

This article explains how the idea gained ground before it was debunked.
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Norm Macdonald on battling cancer

The comedian just died of cancer at the age of 61. I had never actually seen him perform but read that he had a droll deadpan manner and an offbeat take on the mundane. I came across this audio recording of a stand up bit that he did ten years ago that dealt with something that also has struck me as odd, that when it comes to cancer, people who have it are always described as ‘battling it’, a fighting metaphor that is rarely applied to other ailments.

Macdonald had apparently kept his cancer diagnosis secret so that his death came as a surprise to those who knew him. Maybe he did not want to have people talking about him too ‘battling’ cancer.

Public Service Announcement: Never trust someone’s friend about anything

In the crazy media world we live in these days, I saw multiple headlines about a story in which Nicki Minaj had tweeted that a friend of her cousin who lived in Trinidad and Tobago got swollen testicles and became impotent after taking a covid-19 vaccine and his fiancee called off their wedding. The ensuing publicity resulted in the minister of public health in that country wasting his time investigating this before announcing that they could not any evidence of swollen testicles.

I grant that this story has many clickbait features: A celebrity, covid-19, impotence, and swollen testicles.

But really? Whenever you hear an outlandish story, your guard should immediately go up. And you should definitely ignore the story if it is ascribed to an unidentified friend of even someone you know personally, let alone someone whom you do not know at all. That almost guarantees that the story is at best highly exaggerated or more likely outright false.

This has been a Public Service Announcement. We now go back to our regular programming.