phonypc

That does not jibe with my reading. Which is that there were certainly flightless birds that survived K-Pg (Palaeognathae, ostrich ancestors) and the dominant flying dinosaurs (Enantiornithes) died off, but Neognathae survived and was flight-capable.

Eh... "Love your neighbor as yourself" in the context of Leviticus doesn't really have the same meaning as the modern interpretation. It's more like "Love your Israelite neighbour, such that God will continue to favor the Israelites and drive/exterminate your larger scale, non-Israelite neighbors from Canaan."

>the dinosaurs that survived K–Pg were not avian

Doesn't the term "avian dinosaur" in some sense mean "survived K-Pg"?

My read is that it's the other way around. i.e. what one could reasonably call Judaism is a good deal younger than the Torah, Hinduism a good deal younger than the Vedas. There are of course traditions within the religions that go back to those writings and further, but take that to its extreme and they all presumably stem from some ur-religion.

I like Sam. I've noticed several instances of him speaking/writing as if rural areas don't exist though. The sentence "If you are burning wood in the United States, Europe, Australia, or any other developed nation, you are most likely doing so recreationally" is just monumentally silly. It's also odd to reference the WHO on the harms of burning solid fuel (not just wood) for heat in an essay condemning recreational fire-burning.

Anyway, it's all just an analogy for religion here. Not a serious treatment of the problem of air pollution.

The categories of overweight and obese are based on BMI, which is not relative proportion of body fat. On average, of a man and woman who both have a BMI of 30, the woman will have a higher proportion of body fat.

Even when better executed, this style of restaurant that's as much a theatre for performance art as a place to actually eat food is so odd to me. The few experiences I've had with it actually featured some delicious food, but everything else about it was so awkward and off-putting that I don't think I'd go back to the places even for a free meal.

Mycenaeans spoke Greek. I've didn't say anything about national identities. If you don't think there was some ethno/cultural/religious/linguistic category in the rough shape of "Greek" before they started calling themselves Hellenes... that's weird.

>Calling them "Greeks" is about as accurate as calling the old Vikings "Norwegians" or "Swedish". Related by descent, but not nearly the same, and almost 1000 years separating them.

I mean... wouldn't the people of the British Isles during the Viking Age have called the raiders Danes, or Norsemen? Not vikings?

If your invaders speak Greek and come from the area of Greece, calling them Greek seems to make sense, albeit obviously not in a way equivalent to Hellenes.

TL;DR: Moses did the Late Bronze Age collapse?

>Macedonians are a completely different people with a different language and different alphabet.

Sure but... Alexander and his countrymen didn't speak that language or use that alphabet, and were not of that people. You might as well say he was an Ottoman Turk, or a Roman.

I did not get the impression that the author intended to uniquely characterize them as savages. Yes, it's the first instance of that word, but the preceding paragraphs are about replacements/displacements/invasions by other groups.

Smallpox vaccines were not "highly sterilizing."

https://twitter.com/santiagokique/status/1465014078938628099

Shameless opportunity to share one of my favourite youtube videos from the last few years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

TL;DW Oulu, Finland is as cold and snowy as any population center in Canada. Plenty of people bike there year round. The issue is municipal infrastructure, not climate.

The former is more accurate, which is to be expected seeing as it's a detail from the main body of the article rather than a headline. Thankfully, the latter article also goes into accurate detail.

What chart for October and November? Your link only goes to 24th September and says it's the latest release.

Edit: this comment and others now appear to be nonsensical because OP essentially replaced their comment with an entirely different one.

What fact is under contention? That SA has deferred vaccine deliveries? That fact is in the excerpt I posted.

Uhhh... yup. Which is why I posted the section of the article that mentions low vaccine demand. In response to the implication that it doesn't.

From the article:

>With roughly a third of South Africans vaccinated, officials there blame a number of factors, including vaccine hesitancy caused by rampant online misinformation. Some critics have blamed a bungled government response. For now, South Africa has far more vaccine doses than it can distribute in time, forcing senior health officials to defer some planned deliveries.

Also Africa is not southern Africa which is not South Africa.

What do you make of visual descriptions in books? Did the author just randomly assign attributes like colour to things? Things that don't and never will exist?

No, my drawing would be quite awful either way. With a picture for reference, it might be more "accurate" in the sense of discrete details, like say it has two blades while my imagined one had four, but I wouldn't be any better at drawing the relative dimensions or shape.

In this scenario, I happened to visualize (rather accurately, after checking) an AH-64. Not some abstract helicopter concept.

Where would one see things other than in their mind? The visual field isn't an accurate representation of reality. It's constructed by the brain.

I don't think the fact that I can't accurately draw a helicopter from an internal visualization indicates I'm not actually visualizing one. I couldn't draw a helicopter accurately even with one sitting in front of me.

The whistleblower situation is an issue. It is not substantial cause for concern about the body of data demonstrating vaccine safety/efficacy. If you're interested, here's a thorough breakdown of the situation: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t...

There are no good studies on ivermectin indicating anything like 62% effectiveness on any metric. The fact that he would present such a study to his audience indicates he is either: not equipped to interpret the studies, or deliberately spreading misinformation.

The conspiratorial aspect of the whistleblower situation isn't that it happened. It undoubtedly did. It's making a mountain out of a molehill and implying that the larger body of vaccine safety/efficacy data is suspect because of it. Maybe he doesn't imply this in so many words, but look at the titles of all his videos on vaccines (nearly universally highlighting supposed negative aspects) and tell me that's not the angle he's trying to convey.

"Pfizermectin" is absolutely a full blown conspiracy theory that contends Paxlovid is functionally the same as ivermectin and there was an effort by Big Pharma to suppress ivermectin while they developed an on patent alternative. He repeatedly emphasizes that ivermectin is cheap in his video. I can't put myself through watching any more of it, but I can only assume he doesn't mention that the required concentrations for ivermectin to display said protease inhibition aren't achievable in vivo.

Citation needed. With a quick search, it looks like the Sahara has been dry for about 5400 years, with a wet-dry cycle going on for millions of years caused by changes in the Earth's orbital axis.

Lots of people are still concerned with processed foods. How do you suppose this indicates otherwise?

OP's idea is batshit, but worth noting that a doubling of the cattle population doesn't necessitate a doubling of emissions. Actually, your second link kinda goes into this. It's written by an animal agriculture advocate who recommends improving the efficiency of, rather than reducing, animal agriculture.

I don't think it follows that because the largest fraction of soy consumption is as animal feed, that animal agriculture drives soy consumption. Soy animal feed is mostly a byproduct of soy oil and biofuel production. If not for that production, we'd just move to the next cheapest feed.

Cheap frozen grocery store patties tend to include textured veg protein anyway, so I'm not sure that's a flattering comparison.

Nah. He signal boosts all the worst conspiracies of the pandemic; "Pfizermectin", abuse of VAERS data, the Pfizer "whistle blower", you name it. While trying to maintain the appearance of showing both sides neutrally and objectively. But look at his most watched videos and the comments on his videos. He's clearly playing into the anti-vax crowd, whether intentionally or not.

I completely reject the notion that nurses are better equipped than doctors to interpret studies in this context; biology, pharmacology etc. In some practical applications of medicine, maybe.