(March 31, 2021 at 3:09 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: I always thought that laughing Sun Baby seemed sinister.

The sun baby in the intro for Louder With Crowder looks a lot more sinister than that baby

Yay! "The World of the Unknown: UFOs" which is a UFO book for kids from 1977 is being reprinted because who doesn't want to teach kids about aliens?

(this may be a photo from some other ufo book for kids)

(March 27, 2021 at 11:48 am)Angrboda Wrote: Why more of these people aren't candidates for the Darwin Awards is a mystery to me.

Some, it's just happening stochastically at the margins, like slightly more anti-maskers dying of Covid. It takes a long time to make inroads but things like losing a tiny percentage of their numbers to stupidity now and then adds up in the long run. In the short run it can actually cost them the voters they need to win a close election. IMHO.

(March 31, 2021 at 3:09 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: I always thought that laughing Sun Baby seemed sinister.

I just found it creepy!

Someone watched all episodes of "Ancient Aliens" and tried to paint a coherent history of the world according to the show, and it's all aliens: Aliens created humans, taught humans agronomy, writing, melting steel; they built pyramids and everything else; they appointed kings when they didn't rule themselves; they created Jesus and were all of the gods; they started the Renaissance; they started the industrial revolution; they interacted with founding fathers to create the U.S. for which ff thanked them by building Washington, D.C. with secret symbols to honor them; and aliens will return to destroy the world by fighting with each other on Earth in the year 2012.

(April 4, 2021 at 1:37 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Someone watched all episodes of "Ancient Aliens" and tried to paint a coherent history of the world according to the show, and it's all aliens: Aliens created humans, taught humans agronomy, writing, melting steel; they built pyramids and everything else; they appointed kings when they didn't rule themselves; they created Jesus and were all of the gods; they started the Renaissance; they started the industrial revolution; they interacted with founding fathers to create the U.S. for which ff thanked them by building Washington, D.C. with secret symbols to honor them; and aliens will return to destroy the world by fighting with each other on Earth in the year 2012.

How anyone could watch that crap, I'll never know.

It's the rise of the "Islamic medicine"

Quote:In late January 2020, the Iranian cleric Abbas Tabrizian publicly set fire to a copy of “Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine,” a foundational text for doctors around the world. It was a dramatic gesture to his hostility to modern medicine.

The following month, when Covid-19 began to ravage his home city of Qom, he had an immediate alternative remedy. “Before going to sleep, put a cotton ball soaked in violet oil into your anus,” he told his 200,000 Telegram followers. A year on, he made international headlines by declaring that coronavirus vaccines would “make people gay.” 

Tabrizian is often referred to as the “father of Islamic medicine” by his followers and is known for pushing unproven remedies to believers, with no regard for scientific consensus. Thousands of shops in Iran sell herbal treatments. This has increased since the imposition of U.S. sanctions in 2012, and the country’s internet is full of start-ups advertising “Islamic” oils and potions for every kind of ailment, backed by religious influencers like Tabrizian.

Mehdi Sabili, an “Islamic medicine specialist” with over 60,000 followers on Instagram, runs one such company. In April, he urged Iranians to sip hot camel urine to ward off the virus. Another even more popular figure, with 185,000 followers, is Dr. Hossein Ravazadeh, a conspiracy theorist and promoter of Islamic medicine who considers much of modern medicine to be a “colonial conspiracy” dreamed up by Zionists and the British. His remedy for the virus is simpler than Sabili’s: drop bitter watermelon oil into your ears, morning and night, and “all obnoxious creatures” will be unable to enter the body, including Covid-19. 

Rather than being fringe figures, Ravazadeh, Sabili, Tabrizian and others like them are prominent and powerful anti-science voices in Iran. They regularly appear on state TV stations, and draw the support of members of parliament and religious authorities. 

“These people aren’t necessarily popular among the middle class or educated people, but they are being supported, they are being funded, and they have followers who believe what they’re saying and do whatever they say. It’s obviously harmful,” said Farhad Souzanchi, editor of the Farsi-language fact-checking site Fact Nameh. 

Traditional remedies are a source of national pride in many countries. In China, Xi Jinping is leading a similar drive to leverage traditional Chinese medicine to his advantage, believing it to be an effective soft power tool for the Communist party. Beijing is now proposing a ban on all criticism of such treatments, in order to stop scientists questioning their legitimacy.

Still, scientists in Iran can be hesitant to push back against the clerical endorsement of such treatments. “It’s very dangerous to question Islamic texts — it’s risky. But whenever they get the chance, the scientific community object,” said Souzanchi. 

Last year, three doctors were reportedly sentenced to 60 lashes each after they criticized Tabrizian’s burning of the medical manual.

Iran has experienced a steady rejection of established science during the pandemic. In January, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned the importation of vaccines from the U.S. and U.K., branding them “untrustworthy” and saying that it was “not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations.” 

In June 2020, Iran’s ministry of health announced that all students in medicine, dentistry and pharmacology should take Islamic or traditional medicine modules. 26 Iranian MPs have also presented a plan to create an official “Islamic-Iranian medicine organization,” overseen by the health ministry, that would give licenses to sellers prescribing alternative remedies. Last week, the head of Iran’s medical council, the country’s main doctors association, said that such plans were “playing with the nation’s reputation,” and would “undoubtedly cause disillusionment towards both Islam and Iran in scientific and international forums.”

https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/i...cmedicine/

That's crazy and self-defeating, but the cotton ball thing sounds kinda fun.

I had my second COVID shot almost two weeks ago...when do I start finding women sexually appealing?

And btw - the sipping of hot camel urine is only more daffy than Trump's injecting bleach due to the lack of camels here in the US to provide said urine.

QAnon representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who thinks space lasers caused the California wildfires, raised $3 million for her reelection so far.

Quote:Greene rose to political prominence in part because of her positive statements about QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that claims House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats are secretly running a cannibalistic sex-trafficking ring — and that former President Donald Trump has or had a secret plan to stop them. Greene has since distanced herself from those comments.

Those incidents, among others, got Greene stripped of her two committee assignments in early February, including a coveted spot on the House Committee of Education and Labor. A group of 11 Republicans joined all 219 Democrats in the House to remove her, suggesting that while there was some disapproval of Greene among GOP lawmakers, the party was willing to coalesce behind her in light of her Trumpian rhetoric, bluster, and growing national popularity among conservatives.

The very actions that got Greene kicked off her committee assignments and drew the ire of House Democrats helped boost her national name recognition — and led to a great deal of coverage in conservative media. Greene’s popularity among Republicans went up 11 percentage points in the days following the vote, with 30 percent of GOP voters viewing her favorably

Given her popularity and apparent fundraising acumen, Greene’s future in Congress is all but assured — if she can survive what will probably be a difficult primary battle in 2022.

https://www.vox.com/22372051/marjorie-ta...y-midterms