Ice-nine is a fictional material that appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Ice-nine is described as a polymorph of water which instead of melting at 0 °C (32 °F), melts at 45.8 °C (114.4 °F). When ice-nine comes into contact with liquid water below 45.8 °C (thus effectively becoming supercooled), it acts as a seed crystal and causes the solidification of the entire body of water, which quickly crystallizes as more ice-nine. As people are mostly water, ice-nine kills nearly instantly when ingested or brought into contact with soft tissues exposed to the bloodstream, such as the eyes or tongue.

In the story, it is invented by Dr. Felix Hoenikker and developed by the Manhattan Project in order for the Marines to no longer need to deal with mud. The project is abandoned when it becomes clear that any quantity of it would have the power to destroy all life on earth.

So… bad. The worst thing about it is the chain reaction propogation, the least little speck dropped in any ocean anywhere would rapidly freeze 99.9% of the Earth’s water.

Now the interesting thing is that this was an actual proposal by Nobel Prize Winning Chemist (1932) Irving Langmuir who worked for General Electric. As it turns out Ice Nine is impossible because of chemistry and physics beyound my current understanding (hey, I’m a bright enough guy but I’m a Historian and Writer not a theoretical Chemist or Physicist and like Sherlock there are things I don’t need to know because they’re not relevant) but there are some polymorphic ices that have been created in laboratories, just not ones that are stable at Earth tempuratures and pressures (might want to check incoming space debris though).

There are some chemical polymorphs that do share some the qualities of Ice Nine, Wikipedia mentions Ritonavir, an anti-AIDS medicine, and Prion based diseases where protein folding can be warped extensively with a tiny amount of Prion catalyst.

In any event it’s a chilling future (though not necessarily a cold one, 114 °F is pretty damn hot if you ask me) and one that could easily be duplicated by Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).

As I mentioned in passing earlier this week one of the leading developers and promoters of GMOs is Monsanto, a Mega-Corporation Agri-Business and Chemical company. Their motivation for this research is primarily to develop crops that are resistent to their “Weed Killer” RoundUp. RoundUp itself is simply a civillian commercial variant of the Agent Orange Defoliant that was used in Vietnam and some people consider a Chemical Warfare Agent because of the toxic effects of the active ingredient, Dioxin, on the human body. Thousands of Veterans died in agony from poisoning, albiet years after their exposure.

The danger is (you know, outside of direct contact with RoundUp) that GMO crops will cross-pollinate with less desireable and more invasive plants and create colonies of Super-Weeds that are uncontrolable with normal methods and must be, as the Internet meme puts it, killed with fire.

With that background in mind I give you this alarming report from Alternet (nope, still not ‘Fake News’)-

The Sordid Tale of Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Bentgrass, the Dangerous Grass That Never Dies
By George Kimbrell, AlterNet
December 17, 2016

Earlier this month, the Department of Agriculture quietly greenlighted the first-ever genetically engineered grass. The GE creeping bentgrass, a product of Monsanto and Scotts, is genetically engineered to be immune to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

You may not have heard of it, but GE grass has quite a horror-film backstory. Once destined for golf courses nationwide, Monsanto first petitioned USDA for approval in 2002. Scientists were very worried: like all GMOs, the GE grass could cross-pollinate with related wild species, and spread uncontrollably. Because their tiny seeds and even lighter pollen can be carried on the wind for many miles, and they have lots of relatives they can cross-pollinate, GE grasses are even more assured to spread and contaminate other plants than other GE crops, like GE corn or GE soy, are. And like all of Monsanto’s GE products, they were engineered with the sole purpose of selling more Roundup to douse on them, which has resulted in dramatic increases in the pesticides entering our waters and native ecosystems. So when the GE grass did escape, farmers and regulators would have a superweed to deal with, one that would require even more toxic herbicides to kill.

Despite these concerns, the process moved along. The chemical companies that engineer patented GE seeds first do outdoor experiments—trials that are overseen by USDA, albeit usually poorly. And the 2003 GE grass experiments turned into a spectacular nightmare for USDA, Monsanto, and Scotts.

First, the Center for Food Safety successfully sued over the field trials, resulting in a federal court finding them unlawful. Remarkably, USDA had failed to analyze the environmental impacts of the GE grass escaping the trials. It got worse from there: as we and others had warned, the GE grass did indeed escape the trials and spread, even contaminating a National Grassland over a dozen miles away. A USDA investigation ended in a half a million dollar penalty.
…
Farmers were also extremely worried. They did they not want a novel superweed invading. Also, the experiments were in Oregon, the grass seed capital of the world, where grass seed is a 300 million dollar a year industry to the state. So the crop contamination risks could not be any higher. Nor are they hypothetical risks, far from it: Repeated GMO contamination incidents in other U.S. crops have cost farmers literally billions over the past decade in rejected sales, lost exports and closed agricultural markets, with new episodes “cropping” up regularly.

This should have been the end of GE bentgrass – and everybody thought it was. Field trials were halted, and Scotts and Monsanto stopped pushing for a commercial approval. Until 2011, when, out of the blue, Oregon farmers found new feral populations thriving in the wild, five years after Scotts and Monsanto promised it was all cleaned up. USDA initially tried to keep the new discovery a secret, but the findings became public because of testimony in another case of ours. Scotts/Monsanto and USDA swooped back in, unveiling a new plan and assuring local farmers and Oregon state regulators that this time, they actually would eliminate the rogue GE grass.

However after four years of failing, the chemical companies devised a new Machiavellian scheme: in exchange for a promise to USDA they would not commercialize the GE grass, USDA would finally grant their petition to commercial it. Why? Because once USDA granted the approval, USDA would lose the authority it has to make the companies clean up the mess, pushing the problem instead onto the shoulders of the local farmers and the state. And the “promise” not to commercialize? Only good, at most, through 2023, and revocable at any time by Scotts.

Oregon opposed. So did the local farmers and public interest organizations. FWS restated its alarm. Yet in the dying days of this administration, USDA apparently prioritized doing the chemical companies’ bidding, issuing the approval for GE bentgrass anyway. And those acknowledged harms to farmers and the environment? The agency refused (again) to weigh them, this time saying it didn’t have to because they would not come to pass, since the companies have promised not to sell the harmful product USDA just relinquished authority over. Because corporations, including Monsanto, have never lied before, right? Perhaps they have some oceanfront property out in eastern Oregon to sell farmers too.

And all just to make Golf Courses prettier for our elites and money for Monsanto. To quote from Ian Welsh.

Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will happen. It is that simple.

The Legacy Media decries “Fake News” because they long for their lost status as “Gatekeepers”, not because they have any scruples about propagating falsehoods and propaganda even of the most Goebbels/Völkischer Beobachter sort (see Part 1).

What is a “Gatekeeper”? Well, another word for it would be “Middleman”, someone who inserts themselves into a transaction to profit from it, taking money from both sides for their supposed services as a “facilitator” while in fact contributing nothing. A non-Media exemplar would be Health Insurance, which is not at all the same thing as Health Care. The putative “service” they provide is mediating between you and the catastrophic cost of serious illness. They do this by charging you exorbitant fees, excluding large portions of minimal preventive care (high deductibles), and “sharing the risk” with a larger population which is not actively sick.

Under the Affordable Care Act (an oxymoron commonly known as Obamacare) they are granted a lucrative Government Monopoly codifying many of their worst practices. True they are no longer allowed to exclude people because of prior conditions, but they are still able to deny people needed care on the whims of an actuary and are guaranteed a 20% profit and delivered a captive clientele by the police power of the State.

Why do we need them?

In the “News” Media the bulk of money for traditional print outlets came from the sale of advertising, any “news” was merely attractive packaging. Their commercial Middleman role was delivering your eyeballs and thousands or millions of others for the blandishments of businesses. A little known fact is that the bulk of this revenue came not from big corporations with fancy graphics but from 140 character snippets of text called “Classified Ads”. Now we have Craig’s List, E-Bay, and Twitter. In “Broadcast” News you could deliver higher volumes of eyeballs and solicit fewer customers resulting in efficiencies of scale (instead of having a staff to handle hundreds of small accounts you only need 3 or 4 major sponsors).

Where did this money go? Into local beat reporters and investigative journalism? Hell no! It went into the pockets of Media Magnates and a small circle of Celebrity Pundit Personalities who’s primary qualification is that they can read from a Teleprompter and not look at the wrong camera too often.

They like to style themselves “journalists” because of their vanity but nothing could be further from the truth. They are stenographers and shills for the Neoliberal Consensus. You can call them professional liars and I frequently do, but I suspect that they just don’t care whether what they say is factual or not because they are lazy and indifferent. Their only real concern is if their Producers (because they are faaar to important for such mundane work) can deliver them a “get” of a popular figure that they will pander and suck up to on camera lest they ruin the incestuous relationship. Comfort the Afflicted an Afflict the Comfortable my Ass (and I’m not talking about a Donkey here).

They are collectively jealous that the real reporting is being done by underpaid and often anonymous people on the Internet and that more and more of their consumers are not bothering with their bullshit which diminshes their value as deliverers of eyeballs for their corporate clients. This is why they are attempting to construct their own Monopoly of Information guarded by Government Censorship.

And make no mistake, Censorship and Gatekeeping is precisely what the “Fake News” scandal is all about. This is why sites like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, Truthdig, and Common Dreams are lumped in with The Drudge Report. The difference between them is that the first 4 report the real news that is inconvenient for the Neoliberal Establishment because it exposes their lies and The Drudge Report is a compendium of falsehood that the Legacy Media is secretly ashamed of slavishly parroting because their own philosophy is so bankrupt of ideas and energy that they can hardly be bothered to do any work or have an original thought.

The Lies At The Heart Of Our Dying Order
by Ian Welsh
2016 December 16

One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media and politicians.

It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: promises were made that turned out to be lies. They were not kept.
…
The world order we live in was born in 1979 or 1980, with Thatcher and Reagan. It made a few core promises:

• If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs;
• Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity;
• Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone;
• Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.

These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.
…
Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it. Who didn’t buy into it? Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right”.

So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right. Because people are ideologically and identity driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.

Trump does not talk like those people. Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and to a large extent, neither did Sanders.

And so they are turning to people who don’t parse like the regular type of elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right), but that doesn’t matter to a lot of people: they can’t take the pain any more; the(y are) assured long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.

Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. That is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal) and experts have done to themselves and the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: if you trust them, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says “but 90% of economists think X is bad”.

FAIL. They also missed the housing bubble. They lied or were “mistaken” about trade deals. Their opinion means nothing.

All this screaming about fake news is something I will take seriously when the New York Times, who helped sell the Iraq war based on “fake news” is listed as fake.

The current order has very little credibility left, and they are losing more and more. Look at all the poll failures: somehow the polls almost always get it wrong against insurgents, not for them.

No, neoliberalism is dying, and its defenders are discredited, and both things deserve to be the case. That does not mean its death-throes will be pleasant (they won’t be) or that what replaces it has to be better, just that it has run its course.

Those who supported it took their rewards in their time: the top tier got filthy stinking rich, the courtiers received good jobs and money, when for their victims, the good jobs and money were going away. They will have to be satisfied with that, because posterity will be absolutely scathing to them, as it is to the generation leading up to World War I.

Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will happen. It is that simple.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Wright brothers conduct the first successful manned, powered flight of the airplane. U.S. test-fires the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile; Simon Bolivar dies in Colombia; television’s Tiny Tim marries his fiancee, Miss Vicky.

Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.

Alfred Austin

Read the rest of this entry »

Here at DocuDharma and The Stars Hollow Gazette we have the deepest respect for our readers and only publish the most vile and scurrilous rumors which we very helpfully label for you so you can quickly sully your social media accounts with our lies, propaganda, and disinformation.

Please tell all your friends because we desperately want to become an Internet media juggernaut and monetize our sites and eventual sell out for Billions!

Here’s some juicy clickbait I came across, see if you can identify the source-

Researchers have developed a new theory: Evolution favored small female pelvises and large newborns for good reasons.

And, the researchers said, the rise of cesarean sections — the surgical delivery of a baby — in recent decades may be contributing to an even bigger gap between the size of newborns and their mothers’ pelvises. In fact, the researchers estimate that the regular use of C-sections has led to a 10 to 20 percent increase in the gap between female pelvis width and babies’ size.

“Evolution is happening even in our modern society,” said study lead author Philipp Mitteroecker, an assistant professor with the Department of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

But, the human female pelvis has remained small, despite evolution, the researchers said.

“The dimensions of the infant head and shoulders are very close to and even exceed the dimensions of the mother’s birth canal in humans,” said Wenda Trevathan. She’s a professor emeritus of anthropology at New Mexico State University.
…
In the new study, Mitteroecker and his colleagues created a mathematical model that they believe shows that evolution favored bigger babies because it helped the species survive.

“Medical data show that larger newborns have higher survival rates and are less affected by several diseases,” he said.

The researchers also looked at cesarean section births.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, cesarean surgeries have been around for hundreds of years, but in earlier times they were typically performed on dead or dying mothers in order to save the baby.

There’s no firm evidence that Julius Caesar was a product of this procedure, even though it may be named after him.

In recent years, cesarean rates have grown around the world even though there’s controversy over how many of them are actually needed. Approximately one in three U.S. births is by cesarean, according to the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“If women have the idea that bigger babies are healthier, and to a point they are, they may choose surgical delivery to have a bigger baby,” Trevathan said.
…
The authors of the new study estimate that the growth in cesarean sections over the last 60 years has actually affected evolution by making the gap between pelvic size and newborn size even larger.

Wouldn’t this lead to more difficult non-cesarean births? “That’s what we predicted,” Mitteroecker said.

However, “It is difficult to judge how much the rate of birth complications has really increased,” he said.

What’s next as humans continue to evolve? “That’s not easy to foresee,” Mitteroecker said. “But I don’t think that one day every baby needs to be delivered by C-sections.”

Here’s another one-

Human ingenuity increasingly allows us to fight back against “natural selection” and, in effect, influence the path of our own evolution.

Take Cesarean sections, the procedure in which babies are born via surgical incision rather than through the mother’s birth canal. Some form of the procedure has been around for hundreds of years, but only in the past few decades has it become commonplace.

In the US, C-sections now account for 30 percent of all births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But back in 1970, that figure was around 5 percent. So while C-sections have only been widely available to mothers for just a couple of generations, already scientists are speculating that the procedure is affecting human evolution.
…
Where C-sections are available, the risk of an obstructed pregnancy drops considerably. “Most cases of fetopelvic disproportion … were lethal without C-sections,” Philipp Mitteröcker, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Vienna, writes me. “Hence these mothers were not able to pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis and or a large fetal size to the next generation.”

C-sections changed birth survival rates, “which is, per definition, a change of selection pressure,” Mitteröcker says. And when selection pressures change, we evolve.
…
Mitteröcker doesn’t have direct evidence for this; rather, he and his colleagues have worked out a mathematical model that predicts how many more cases of fetopelvic disproportion ought to be occurring now that C-sections are commonplace. And according to this model, the rate of fetopelvic disproportion has risen from 3 percent to around 3.66 percent in the past few decades.

Put more simply: He predicts more babies whose heads are too big for their mothers’ hips, because, presumably, the genes that code for narrow hips and big heads have been allowed to propagate.

This is just a prediction, he says. “To my knowledge, this has not been shown empirically yet.”
…
”C-sections that matter for evolution are only the ones that actual saved lives and hence were really necessary,” Mitteröcker says. “Our model says nothing about the many C-section carried out for other reasons.”
…
Again, this is just a theory. Mitteröcker says it would take a study of many generations of births, complete with hereditary data and skeleton size data, to confirm the prediction. “We are about to carry out these studies,” he says.

Folks, this is bad science. Fake News!

Not just that but of a particularly Anti-Vaxxer, Eugenicky, Lysenkoism sort, allow me to debunk.

Debunk

noun: descend from the upper levels of a vertically stacked bed.

In the first piece we “learn” that people don’t bother to click links. Proof that “Evolution favored small female pelvises and large newborns,” is U.S. death rate in pregnancy, childbirth raises “great concern” which among other things tells us-

For every 100,000 live births, nearly 24 women died during, or within 42 days after pregnancy in 2014. That was up from nearly 19 per 100,000 in 2000
…
With the 2014 numbers, the United States would rank 30th on a list of 31 countries reporting data to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — beating out only Mexico.

Now, those are interesting facts and show us how poor U.S. Healthcare is, but I defy you to find any reference at all to “evolution”, “small female pelvis”, or even “large newborn”. To be fair it does mention “newborn”. You could look it up, I have.

Next “regular use of C-sections has led to a 10 to 20 percent increase in the gap between female pelvis width and babies’ size,” proven by-

The research, published in the British Medical Journal, found that newborns delivered by C-section are more likely to develop obesity, asthma, and type 1 diabetes when they get older.

In a meta-analysis of studies, Dr. Jan Blustein of New York University’s School of Medicine and Dr. Jianmen Liu of Peking University found 20 studies that link C-sections to type 1 diabetes, 23 studies that suggested a tie with asthma and another nine that found an association with obesity.

In the U.S., the overall childhood asthma rate is 8.4 percent, which jumps to 9.5 percent among those born via C-section. The obesity rate among children delivered vaginally is 15.8 percent, versus 19.4 percent among kids born by C-section. Type 1 diabetes occurs in 2.13 of every 1,000 infants born from C-section, compared to 1.79 per 1,000 babies delivered vaginally.

“It is clear that cesarean-born children have worse health, but further research is needed to establish whether it is the cesarean that causes disease, or whether other factors are at play,” Dr. Blustein said in a press release. “Getting definitive answers will take many years of further research. In the interim, we must make decisions based on the evidence that we have. To me, that evidence says that it is reasonable to believe that cesarean has the potential for long-term adverse health consequences for children.”

Bluetein told CBS News, “People have always known the consequences of vaginal delivery — brain damage, cerebral palsy, shoulder dystocia — but there is not much discussion of the long-term downsides of cesarean delivery.”

Let’s take a look at those margins shall we? Accepting the numbers at face value we find a 1.1% greater chance of asthma, a 3.6% greater chance of obesity, and a .34% greater chance of diabetes. As someone who has worked with statistics I can tell you that asthma and diabetes definitely fall in the margin of error and, depending on methodology, obesity does too. I’m sure the polls that had Hillary Clinton winning the Presidency had much larger sample sizes.

And even Dr. Blustein, whom I now consign to that Circle of Hell reserved for pseudo-scientist Anti-Vaxxers, concedes that these have to be balanced against the known “consequences of vaginal delivery — brain damage, cerebral palsy, shoulder dystocia”.

Not to mention the death of the mother.

Just so your kid has less chance of being fat? Also without consideration that large children carried beyond term may require a C-Section to survive because they’re… large.

Now I like Bill Nye, The Science Guy. I happen to disagree with him about Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) food. He feels there is no alternative and I think it’s a scam by Monsanto to sell RoundUp (basically Agent Orange). His citation in defense of this is a contemptible canard.

“I feel we have a real problem of anti-science right now,” Nye said. “If you have people who are voters and taxpayers who don’t believe in science, we’re gonna fall behind as a society.”

“Climate change is real,” he said in an online video. “Let’s keep in mind that there’s something about which you should give a f***.”

Braver asked, “Have you become politicized?”

“Yeah, well, people look at me as a political figure, for sure.”

“And is that okay with you?”

“Well, what’s the alternative?” Nye replied. “I mean, if climate change is objectively an enormous problem, and if you think it’s because I’m a progressive and you’re a conservative, then that’s you putting it on me. I really work to be open-minded.”

There is no doubt his point regarding evolution, which is barely mentioned in the cited article, is true (he’s an evolutionist and so am I). Evolution is all around you and happening every day, even to humans.

We will return to evolution.

Finally in the links we find this statement by Wenda Trevathan, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at New Mexico State University-

“The dimensions of the infant head and shoulders are very close to and even exceed the dimensions of the mother’s birth canal in humans.”

Supported by a story about Zika Virus induced Microcephaly- Zika birth defect may surface months after birth.

The findings come from a study of 13 Brazilian babies whose heads all appeared normal at birth but then grew much more slowly than normal.

Most people infected with Zika never develop symptoms, but infection during pregnancy can cause devastating birth defects, including microcephaly, in which a baby’s skull is much smaller than expected because the brain hasn’t developed properly.

Microcephaly is diagnosed based on a measurement of the baby’s head circumference. It can be done during pregnancy using b>ultrasound, or after the baby is born. Doctors then compare the measurement to standard sizes of other kids, based on gender and age.
…
Investigators are working to determine what proportion of Zika-infected women have babies with birth defects, and how the risk varies based on when during the pregnancy the infection occurred. Earlier research has suggested that 1 percent to 14 percent of Brazilian mothers infected in the first three months of pregnancy had babies with microcephaly and that the risk falls when infections happen later in a pregnancy.

WHO’s Salama called the risk “small but significant, but it’s definitely a moving target as well.”

What is the author trying to suggest here? That the solution to small pelvises, big full-term children, and C-Sections is Microcephalic Zika babies? I’ll note that the author I’m talking about here is the author of the underlying piece, the one who thought these links were relevant.

Debunk- Part 2

noun: using your feet and legs to dump someone sleeping above you on the floor.

Now for the second piece. I won’t waste your time with incestuous links like those found in the first one. These are to reputable U.S. Government sources (ok, 1 to Harvard which is only semi-reputable). Instead I’ll illustrate why anyone with the least understanding of biology, genetics, evolution, math, physics, and history would reject Mitteröcker’s claims (as reported).

True enough that our control of our environment (such as it is) has effected our evolution, but not to accelerate it, rather to retard it. Once you have achieved the ability to modify “selective pressures” what is the advantage of modifying your genome (except for sport, which equates to Eugenics)?

What? Eugenics too strong a word for you?

Where C-sections are available, the risk of an obstructed pregnancy drops considerably. “Most cases of fetopelvic disproportion … were lethal without C-sections,” Philipp Mitteröcker, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Vienna, writes me. “Hence these mothers were not able to pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis and or a large fetal size to the next generation.”
…
He predicts more babies whose heads are too big for their mothers’ hips, because, presumably, the genes that code for narrow hips and big heads have been allowed to propagate.

Eugenicky enough for you? They should be allowed to die in childbirth, mother and baby alike lest they pollute our gene pool. Next we’ll come for the rest, the birth defects, the mentally ill, the chronically sick, the Gypsies, the Jews, the Politically Subversive, the non-Blonde (Homosexuals take care of themselves, they don’t breed). Sure, at first it will only be forced sterilization, but why not work camps? They’re just a lot of non-productive mouths to feed and detract from the security of the Homeland.

I recall another Austrian who thought that way. Hmm… who was it?

Again, this is just a theory. Mitteröcker says it would take a study of many generations of births, complete with hereditary data and skeleton size data, to confirm the prediction. “We are about to carry out these studies.”

Calling Dr. Mengele. Dr. Himmler? Dr. Heydrich?

And once again, shall we look at the numbers? What is that margin of that “fetopelvic disproportion”? .66%? Sorry Philipp. Statistically insignificant by any measure regardless of sample size (a Universe of 13 like the Zika victims? Small Universes are common in epidemiological studies but how small is yours? Did you ever even take Stats 101?).

Trofim Lysenko thought that “rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that ‘natural cooperation’ was observed in nature as opposed to ‘natural selection'”.

Well, that’s not how it works. Even given “selective pressures” both desirable and undesirable characteristics (which are entirely subjective) take generations of breeding to manifest themselves (absent direct genetic manipulation). Mitteröcker says himself that in 1970 the rate of C-Sections was 5%. That’s 46 years. How many human generations is that? Even if each girl got pregnant at 14- only 3.2.

Mitteröcker doesn’t have direct evidence for this; rather, he and his colleagues have worked out a mathematical model that predicts how many more cases of fetopelvic disproportion ought to be occurring now that C-sections are commonplace.
…
This is just a prediction, he says. “To my knowledge, this has not been shown empirically yet.”

Not Science. Fail.

Guessing Time!

So I ask you where did I pick this story up from? Stormfront? Maybe Top Conservative News or Metapedia (3 very popular Neo-Nazi Racist websites)?

Sorry, My first example is CBS News–

C-section births may give rise to evolutionary changes
By Randy Dotinga, CBS News
December 6, 2016, 3:42 PM

Citations-

U.S. death rate in pregnancy, childbirth raises “great concern”
By Amy Norton, CBS News
August 9, 2016

C-section births linked to long-term child health problems
By Amy Kraft, CBS News
June 11, 2015

Bill Nye the Science Guy: Here to change the world
by Rita Braver, CBS News
July 10, 2016

Zika birth defect may surface months after birth
Associated Press, CBS News
November 22, 2016

Incestuous at best.

My second? Vox.

Has the rise in C-sections affected human evolution? This scientist predicts yes.
by Brian Resnick, Vox
Dec 7, 2016

Media Meta Criticism Part 1

You know, that some Austrian Assistant Professor idiot preaches pseudo-scientific Eugenic Genocide doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the willingness of Media Gatekeepers to believe it.

Are you going to claim that CBS News and Vox are not enough to lend credibility to this “Fake News”? Like all the rest they’re going out on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit to harvest the eyeballs and get the “news”.

It is Legacy Media like The New York Times and Washington Post, not to mention all the Cable and Network TV organizations, that are responsible for popularizing and validating “Fake News” like the “Benghazi Scandal” and other far right fever dreams, not legitimate sites like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, and Common Dreams who point out the falsehood of Establishment Neoliberal Media Memes and Tropes.

Meta Disclaimer

DocuDharma and The Stars Hollow Gazette are privately funded. They’re cheap enough that even I can afford them and I am by no means rich. Not that I pay the rent, I am an artist and have a patron who indulges me with canvas and paint.

While I have entertained different ideas in the past (mostly related to democratizing) I don’t require or desire your monetary support at the moment and am beholden to no advertiser. If you have a contribution to give in the form of content or comment it is more than sufficient gratitude.

I say this lest you believe my hyperbole above and conclude I will ever sell out or surrender.

“Nuts.”- Anthony Clement McAuliffe

While I try to keep up I was unaware until recently that a disturbing trend I had noticed actually had a name and I was not alone in my perceptions.

It is almost possible (but not quite) using Computer-generated Imagery (CGI) to duplicate human actors’ performances in ways that are not immediately apparent. Consider the mass combat scenes of Battle of Five Armies (frequently derided because it is as obvious and egregious as the replicants of the Total War series of games).

The dead tell is the inhuman synchronization of multitudes, you can observe the same phenomena on a smaller scale in the dance moves of the animated Descendants shorts on Disney Channel (what do you not get about the fact I watch TV all the time and it’s ‘Tween Comedies and Cartoons, never “news”). They are always exact duplicates and perfectly in step.

Well, welcome to Uncanny Valley, home of Max Headroom, Gollum, and Hulk (the great big green rage monster one, not Mark Ruffalo having tender moments with Scarlett Johannson which btw caused me to sweat from my eyes a little). The funny thing is that while many would consider Max seminal, because it was low budget TV almost all the effects from the background to Matt Frewer in prosthetic makeup (which he hated) were practical. Computers were too damn expensive.

“Uncanny Valley” as a term is shorthand and the “Uncanny” part is that computers, while capable of stunning effects, are not really so good at mimicking humans. This is why Andy “Gollum” Serkis gets a lot of work. Most of the really convincing stuff is done by “motion capture” which is basically just an upgraded version of Rotoscope that had been used for decades before Disney did it in Snow White (1937).

It’s kind of a different and more complicated thing to use it to substitute for an actor that is dead. A prominent example is Furious 7 where Paul Walker died (ironically) in a car crash with his scenes half unfilmed.

Of course they wrote around it and used body doubles and back shots, but parts were Zombie CGI. Did you notice?

I didn’t because I’ve never seen Furious 7, it’s not the kind of movie I like (certainly not enough to blow $15 on). It does raise the question, why not do a Casablanca sequel with Zombie Humphrey Bogart and Zombie Ingrid Bergman (frankly if that’s what you want watch To Have and Have Not, it’s excellent).

The reason this comes up is because of Zombie Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. Admittedly it is difficult to deal with the Deathstar without including his character, but it is kind of creepy since he died in 1994.

James Earl Jones is still alive last time I checked.