>An interesting part is the "we'll send you an email to confirm you're you", followed by a "enter validation code here" screen that immediately gets forwarded to the re-enrollment message. Also, no confirmation emails are being sent.
"Wi-Fi calling" (LTE over IP over wifi) often allows you to get SMS messages over wifi only, on an ordinary cell plan: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108066 (Android supports it too)
>(More surprisingly, there is evidence that lead is an essential micronutrient in trace quantities but its biological function is not currently known.)
Do you have some links about this? I found some papers re arsenic but I can't find anything re lead.
>it was 30 or so shots into my stomach, given over multiple days - and causing a lot of soreness and pain in between. I wonder if it’s still like this, because damn
it's not like this anymore; it's just four shots in the upper arm (like any other common vaccine) over two weeks.
There has got to be some sort of two-man rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule) integrated into the system that can't be bypassed by the people with authority to make changes to accounts. Otherwise any insider / careless spear-phishing victim will make the changes they want.
Looking into vitamin K2 (not K1) along with vitamin D is interesting as well -- I got my bone mineral density to 99th percentile (DEXA measured) without changes in physical activity (which has just been walking) with lots of K2 and vitamin D; with the vitamin D from sunlight and a UVB phototherapy lamp when I wasn't getting lots of sunlight. My sense is that bone and teeth health are at least significantly related and I bet having excellent bone density carries over to caries, or to a lack thereof.
My guess is that typical Western diets are pretty subpar in terms of vitamin K2 intake (modern Westerners aren't usually fans of liver etc) which makes teeth pretty vulnerable to physical/chemical insult.
If there are plants (there is a patent and a paper describing this in some algae, IDK if it has been replicated or not...) that have preferences (kinetic isotope effect!) for one isotope of uranium over the other you could technically have a uranium enrichment plant made from uranium enrichment...plants.
Have you tried some from Waveform Lighting? I have some of their bulbs (none of which has broken yet) and I selected them because of the low blue light and zero flicker. (No relationship with them beyond being a satisfied customer).
The claim is that plants cannot run nor fight so their defenses must be chemical (or physical, like spines or needles or camouflage) in nature.
It's far more difficult for a prey animal to have its muscles/fat/organs suffused with chemicals that will kill/injure its likely predators, especially if its predators have similar metabolic pathways as itself -- it'd be at risk of poisoning itself if the poison broke free!
Animals certainly fight back against being eaten (running away, fighting, etc) but once they're dead their meat (barring like, snake venom glands or pufferfish or other poison/venom-suffused sea creatures) won't fight back.
Obviously "plants are poison" is phrased for shock value and there are traditions and safe handling practices (like "cooking", or "not eating green potatoes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine) for plants that remove, denature, or prevent the formation of defensive chemicals.
I feel the author is a bit too quick to debunk/discount the weird extreme claims of the carnivore tradfluencer set and jumps into the opposite direction: there seems to be a consilience of evidence (not just archeological) establishing Paleolithic / pre-agricultural humans as hypercarnivores: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247
I'm totally in agreement that the "raw meat only" pseudo-traditionalist influencer stuff is absolute ahistorical LARP (the frightening doses of steroids certainly is disqualifying) but humans seem well adapted to hunting animals and digesting meat in ways that other primates just aren't (flagrant examples that come to mind are stomach pH and small
intestine vs large intestine size, the linked paper has more). Of course, there indeed have been more recent adaptations to survive better on plants/grains/etc, i think spurred by megafauna becoming more scarce; but that's not really a counterexample for the thesis that prehistoric preagricultural humans ate a lot of meat (not uniquely meat of course!).
> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.
I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.
I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".
I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".
If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.
I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.
"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)
Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.
We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
>I'm not sure I understand why you think this is evidence for the ability of the USSR to keep it secret or otherwise control perceptions?
The USSR successfully manipulated many prominent Western civilian scientists (and subsequently Western newspapers) into buying the "bad meat" Soviet cover-up story, hook, line, and sinker: to the point that they publicly chided the American military for still believing in the "anthrax factory leak" theory:
> But Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former director of epidemiology at the United States Centers for Disease Control, who presided at the session, said Tuesday that based on what he knew so far, "the current position of the U.S. military needs thorough re-
examination; that is clear.'
> Dr. Philip Brachman of Emory University, a U.S. anthrax expert who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the incident, said the Soviet talk was a "landmark report" providing "a pretty good indication that this incident was an outbreak of gastrointestinal anthrax" from eating contaminated meat.
> Dr. Alexander Langmuir, a former chief epidemiologist for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, agreed that the Soviet account was "very credible so far" but added that he hoped to obtain further details during the Soviets' weeklong stay.
How did this happen? Why did this work so well? Because scientific methods designed for operation in adversary-free environments are catastrophically unfit for drawing dependable conclusions when intelligent motivated adversaries have tampered with the available data. The Western civilian scientists were thinking like...scientists, so they got easily manipulated into producing and disseminating literal Soviet disinformation while believing they were furthering the causes of science and of fighting anthrax. Oops:
> Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April: Pyotr Burgasov, retired deputy minister of health; Vladimir Nikiforov, infectious diseases chief at the Moscow Institute for the Advanced Training of Physicians; and Vladimir Sergiyev, director of the Institute of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine. They gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true. U.S. intelligence officials still maintain a military facility was involved.
Spoiler alert: Pyotr Burgasov was part of the response to the leak and part of the Soviet biowarfare program.
The argument for a natural origin of Sverdlovsk anthrax is tragically familiar: establishing a highly plausible way it could have been zoonosis, along with providing evidence consistent with a zoonosis. From the _Science_ article:
> The citizens of Sverdlovsk did not have to look so far to find the bacillus. It has been endemic to the region for centuries.
> The source of the outbreak was traced to a single 29-ton lot of bone meal (cattle feed) sold in March from a factory in Aramil, 15 kilometers to the southeast of Sverdlovsk. It must have taken in and ground up the bones of animals who died the previous year of anthrax. Its product clearly contained live anthrax. An official investigation found that the factory did not follow the prescribed heating and pressure treatment methods. The feed it produced went to a state farm, where veterinarians inoculate the animals, and to private owners, whom state veterinarians often do not bother to visit, according to Burgasov. On the approach of the May Day holiday, animals are slaughtered, generally the weakest (in this case, the sickest) first. The meat from the private butchers is thought to have triggered the outbreak, Burgasov said.
It's only collapse of the USSR that enabled the truth to come out in public. Two Soviet pathologists, against KGB orders, had kept some autopsy samples, which (along with a defector's testimony) annihilated the "bad meat" cover-up story. Turns out the outbreak of airbone anthrax that happened in the same city as the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory was indeed caused by the industrial-scale weaponized anthrax spore factory! https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/sverdlovs...
> fluoride is created by nuclear weapons construction as waste and the government has to get rid of it somehow, so in the water it goes
Like some wild conspiracy theories, there is a kernel of truth to this one. Namely, the fluoride used in water fluoridation is indeed an industrial byproduct -- except not from nuclear weapon manufacture, but from the production of phosphate fertilizer.
They claim to use the spontaneously immortalized UMNSAH/DF-1 chicken fibroblast cell line, which isn't a tumor cell line. I still wouldn't eat any "cultured meat" regardless of the cell line (if my great-grandparents didn't eat it, I'm not eating it) but there is a difference between immortalized and full-on cancerous cells.
That is _exactly_ what happens to me.