Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Horseshoe crab blood is key to making a COVID-19 vaccine—but the ecosystem may suffer.

Each spring, guided by the full moon, hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs clamber onto beaches across the U.S. mid-Atlantic to lay their eggs. For hungry birds, it’s a cornucopia. For drug companies, it’s a crucial resource for making human medicines safe.

That’s because these animals’ milky-blue blood provides the only known natural source of limulus amebocyte lysate, a substance that detects a contaminant called endotoxin. If even tiny amounts of endotoxin—a type of bacterial toxin—make their way into vaccines, injectable drugs, or other sterile pharmaceuticals such as artificial knees and hips, the results can be deadly.

“All pharmaceutical companies around the world rely on these crabs. When you think about it, your mind is boggled by the reliance that we have on this primitive creature,” says Barbara Brummer, state director for The Nature Conservancy in New Jersey.

Every year, pharmaceutical companies round up half a million Atlantic horseshoe crabs, bleed them, and return them to the ocean— after which many will die. This practice, combined with overharvesting of the crabs for fishing bait, has caused a decline in the species in the region in the past few decades.

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Evening News 150 Times More Negative Of Trump Than Biden

As every press conference indicates, the mainstream media and President Trump have a rancorous relationship, but how deep does the press’ antipathy go? A recent study says lopsided coverage of the two presidential candidates is pervasive among all major media outlets.

According to the conservative Media Research Center, which tracks media bias, evening newscasts, which are some of the highest-rated programs on television today, have given President Trump 150 times more negative coverage than Joe Biden throughout this presidential campaign so far.

“From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden,” reported Newsbusters. “This is an even wider gap than the spring when Trump received seven times more coverage than Biden (523 minutes vs. 75 minutes).”

“During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95% of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five% (34) that were positive,” the report continued. “Using the same methodology (fully described at the end of this article), we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.”

In those same two months, virtually every negative story about Biden — from Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations to his sharp leftward shift, to his apparent racial gaffes — was all swept under the rug or dramatically under-reported, even as the newscasts continued to negatively cover President Trump. The former vice president’s own policy platform, which includes massive expansions of government health care, education, and environmental programs, received just “a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist.”

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Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists

Titania was not the only victim. The Babylon Bee, a US satire site, was also temporarily locked out, though it has since been restored. Other satirical accounts – Jarvis Dupont, Guy Verhoftwat, Tolerance Police, Liberal Larry and Sir Lefty Farr-Right QC – all remain suspended. Sir Lefty revealed on Parler that the only reason given for his suspension was ‘platform manipulation and dissemination of spam’.

All the accounts did was make fun of wokeness. But it seems virtue-signalling Silicon Valley nerds can’t take a joke. Apparently, this kind of comedy needs to be silenced.

Ironically, Twitter’s purge of the anti-woke satirists is a complete vindication of their work. In banning those who make fun of wokeness and criticise its censoriousness, Twitter has made it even clearer how authoritarian that wokeness is.

It has also shown wokeness to be totally humourless. Silicon Valley nerds need to lighten up.

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Pandemic analyst finds herd immunity could be slowing COVID spread — yet Dr. Fauci still warns against it

At the moment, nobody knows exactly what the threshold of population infection needs to be at to attain herd immunity. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, said most scientists believe 60% to 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated or have natural antibodies to achieve herd immunity.

Researchers from Stockholm University in Sweden and the University of Nottingham in Britain published a new study in the journal Science on Friday.The scientists estimate that herd immunity could be achieved at a population-wide infection rate of approximately 40%.

Youyang Gu, a computer scientist whose coronavirus projections are one of 34 pandemic models tracked by the CDC, believes that herd immunity could help in the fight against COVID-19.

“Immunity may play a significant part in the regions that are declining,” Gu told MIT Technology Review. Gu estimates that approximately 35 million Americans have now been infected, which is more than 10% of the country’s population.

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