Doug's Darkworld

The above made me laugh, getting harder to do these days as the train wreck that is US election 2020 rolls merrily along. Trump was a big proponent of birtherism, the idea that Obama was born in Kenya, and thus wasn’t eligible to be the POTUS. A theory that never had a single shred of evidence in support of it, but nonetheless was (and likely still is) believed by millions of people. America in the 20th century, there’s zero evidence for it, but I think it should be true, so I believe it. And Trump is the ultimate embodiment of that philosophy of life.

People have always believed in nonsense, it’s just sad so much of it has gone mainstream in America the past few decades. Now we’re at a point where the POTUS doesn’t seem to live in the real world anymore. Birtherism seems quaint in comparison to some of the stuff popping up these days. This week’s Skeptoid had a good article: How to Extract Adrenochrome from Children. Basically, and it’s all wrapped up with QAnon now, there’s this idea that the world’s elite are secretly kidnapping children and torturing/killing them to produce adrenochrome in order to use it as a powerful hallucinogen or as some sort of fountain of youth drug.

Sounds crazy, right? The thing that is almost unbearably stupid about this “theory” is that adrenochrome isn’t a controlled substance, and is cheap and easy to acquire. It’s not some sort of fountain of youth drug, and the idea that it’s a hallucinogen was made up by Hunter S Thompson for a work of fiction: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Basically the adrenochrome theory is a modern incarnation of blood libel, the idea that Jews secretly kill Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes. In other words, the Middle Ages never ended, we just have cooler stuff now.

Speaking of train wrecks, Trump’s campaign is seen as going increasingly off the rails. Several interesting links. First of all, his campaign spending apparently has been shockingly inept, pissing away huge sums of money on questionable things. Or even just basically being little better than embezzlement. The saddest and funniest thing is that they ran Trump TV commercials in Washington, where Trump has zero chance of winning, just because Trump likes to see himself on TV. Yeah, that’s money well spent. Trump’s campaign has burned up money like ’10 monkeys with flamethrowers’: GOP strategist.

The last debate is in two days. Apparently the moderator will be able to shut off the microphone to avoid a repeat of the first “debate,” which largely consisted of old men yelling at and interrupting each other. Saw this headline about Trump’s latest antics: Trump looking like a trapped animal trying to gnaw off its own leg as his 2020 bid flounders: reporter. It made me laugh, here’s the original article without the hype: The Donald Trump Show Must Go On

The madness continues on the campaign trail. I thought it was an interesting read. Lastly, a little gem from the New York Times. Trump Is Giving Up. Against both the coronavirus and Joe Biden, the president’s strategy increasingly accepts defeat. Fun times.

Rush “It’s only a cold folks!” Limbaugh has stage 4 lung cancer: Rush Limbaugh says his lung cancer is terminal. Well, no one lives forever. I won’t mourn his passing. He devoted his life to encouraging conservatives to hate and misunderstand liberals. He was one of the founders and purveyors of the toxic partisanship that is now the heart and soul of Trump’s America.  The man who made childish name-calling a hallowed principle of the right. And Mr Limbaugh is one of the biggest drivers of Covid-19 misinformation, the blood of thousands of dead Americans is on his hands. You could have been a force for good Rush, you chose hate until the end. Jesus wept.

Not a whole lot of good news, as one might expect living in a country where a pandemic is essentially raging out of control. Best guess now is that Covid-19 has directly and indirectly killed about 300,000 Americans. Likely to hit 400,000 by year’s end. So a city the size of St. Louis has died, a city the size of Minneapolis by year’s end. The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year.

Fortunately, while it doesn’t help with the Covid-19 situation, NASA was able to make a great start at averting a potential giant asteroid strike in the 22nd century. How did they do that? A probe, OSIRIS-REx, made a controlled short touchdown on Asteroid Bennu and retrieved a sample. Which it will fly back to Earth in 2023. Bennu is about a third of a mile wide, and has a non-trivial chance of striking Earth in the 22nd century. It would be the equivalent of a good size nuclear bomb, dozens of times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.

So wait, how does getting a sample of Bennu help prevent a collision? Basically, the more we know about it, the better we can predict its orbit and tell how much danger we are really in. And by the same token, the more we know about it, the more we can plan how to move it if it does need to be nudged away. And when it comes to preventing asteroid and comet strikes, the more lead time the better, several decades at minimum. So good going NASA.

Looks like winter has started here in Northern Iowa. Cold and rainy with freezing nights. Sometimes we get Indian Summer weather into November, maybe not this year. Well, if there was a year for an early cold nasty winter, it’s 2020. Bring it on. I did manage to make one last metal detector find, and a nice one it is. When I can get a good picture, I’ll post about it.

Stay safe everyone, comments, questions, shares, likes, appreciated. Patrons too. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: Found on Facebook, attribution in image. Used without permission, claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law.)