Articles Posted by Raymond Pamintuan
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My cousin lives in Madrid. His wife was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week and admitted to Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre. (I know, a crazy name for a hospital) They put her on hydroxychloroquine (200 mg, 3× day), an HIV anti-viral, and an antibiotic drip. Her viral load has now dropped to zero and she will be released and allowed to go home tomorrow (she just sent me a Facebook Messenger text). FIVE days after diagnosis. Sure, it's anecdotal, but it hits close to home. My cousin is now showing symptoms - it looks like he's next. I also have...
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Abstract We need an effective treatment to cure COVID-19 patients and to decrease the virus carriage duration. In 80 in-patients receiving a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin we noted a clinical improvement in all but one 86 year-old patient who died, and one 74 year old patient still in intensive care unit. A rapid fall of nasopharyngeal viral load tested by qPCR was noted, with 83% negative at Day7, and 93% at Day8. Virus cultures from patient respiratory samples were negative in 97.5% patients at Day5. This allowed patients to rapidly de discharge from highly contagious wards with a mean...
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I've been watching some NBA games on YouTube and decided to update my ranking of the greatest basketball players of all time. The variables are player statistics, the impact the player had on his team, the strength of the opposition, and the strength of the player’s team (such as whether he had someone to elevate his game). I use a tier system, where arguments can be made for any particular ranking for players within the same tier. In my opinion, Michael Jordan is the greatest of all time (the GOAT). There’s never been anyone who dominated both ends in a...
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Awesome website containing talking points and videos for your liberal relatives. Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.
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Copy video before YouTube takes it down!
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Televangelist Kenneth Copeland announced on his website this week that his duplicitous fleecing operation Kenneth Copeland Ministries (KCM) has taken possession of a Gulfstream V airplane. (HT: Christian Daily Reporter) "What a wonderful gift!" Elite CX Team Leader Charlie Bollinger wrote about the purchase on his KCM blog. "We knew the Gulfstream V would come quickly, and now we have it. And it’s all because of you, the faithful KCM Elite CX Team members–combined with the blessings of a FAITHFUL GOD!" Copeland didn't disclose how much the "ministry" paid for the GV. KCM explained that the Holy Spirit had confirmed...
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You’ve had a long day, and you have to get up early tomorrow morning. You’re tucked into bed and ready for a good night’s sleep when you hear it: Your neighbor’s baby is wailing away once again. Your sleep-deprived mind is split between two options: either do your best to ignore the infant’s unending crying fit, or file a noise complaint and let the police handle the problem. Many people have had to deal with this same scenario, and some folks on Quora shared their own stories on how they’ve dealt with it, but what would YOU do?
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In my previous article, I originally defined atheism as “the rejection of the possibility that ‘God’ exists” because that is how I’ve understood the word from the time I spent studying theodicy (God and the problem of evil). But many “atheist” commenters disagreed with this definition because their self-designation was based on belief statements that didn’t align with my knowledge statement. This article explains the differences between the viewpoints and the logic behind them. Atheism is commonly called the belief that there aren’t any gods or the lack of belief in gods. But in a more accurate, philosophical sense, it...
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Atheism, the rejection of the possibility that “God” exists, has become the dominant thought amongst intellectuals in the past century and has been around longer than most people think. For over 2000 years, it was based on philosophical arguments that can roughly be summed up as the atheist saying, “I don’t know how ‘X’ came to be, but you can’t prove it came from God.” This mindset has been highly effective because it places the burden of proof on the theist to prove the positive of God’s existence, which, superficially, is impossible to do – because no evidence exists that...
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Three strange incidents occurred in recent weeks. Nancy Pelosi was "shouted down by immigration activists for trying to strike Dreamers deal with Trump." Hillary Clinton's book received disappointing reviews from the left, and former FBI director James Comey was heckled at Howard University. “Go home Comey, you’re not our homey.” The audience was turning on its performers. All were signs the once reliable Blue Model is misfiring. Time magazine ... offer a brutal assessment concerning the direction of the Democratic Party. One rallying cry from the Left is that Clinton lost because she ... wasn’t left wing enough. Every time...
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We know, to the best of our senses and instruments, that the universe exists. How did it come into reality 13.8 billion years ago? In other words, what caused the Big Bang? Roughly speaking, there are two possibilities: “nothing” caused the universe to come into being or “something” triggered it into existence.
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Not much is known about the new film "Mother!" Director Darren Aronofsky has remained silent about many of the details, but he has released a disturbing poem which twists the Lord's Prayer. "Our mother who art underfoot, hallowed be thy names, thy seasons come, thy will be done, within us as around us, thank you for our daily bread, our water, our air, and our lives and so much beauty; lead us not into selfish craving and the destructions that are the hungers of the glutted, but deliver us from wonton consumption of thy vast but finite bounty, for thine...
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I knew things were getting strange when I realized I was proud of Melania Trump. After all, here was a woman who had posed for porn-ish lesbian photos and once admitted that she married Donald Trump for money. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Who doesn't like lesbian porn? And why else would anyone marry Donald Trump? Still, it did not strike me as the best resume for a first lady. But she's a great first lady: charming, stylish and empathetic. I experience a bit of cognitive dissonance every time it hits me, but I am delighted to have...
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When it comes to natural disasters, probably everyone is thinking of Hurricane Harvey and its destruction in and around Houston. In addition to that devastation, there are also wildfires raging in southern California and Montana (hundreds of people have had to evacuate). Aside from those terrible disasters, most people don't spend much time thinking about chemical spills, blizzards, tornados, riots, or terrorist attacks. Now that I have your attention, are you taking steps to protect yourself and family in the wake of a disaster?
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The very serious problems of abiogenesis and technological intelligence and the mathematical odds against finding intelligent extraterrestrials explain why we’ve never been able to detect extraterrestrial intelligences—and probably never will. We can all sleep soundly at night without worrying that aliens are going to come down from the sky to destroy or invade us. This then brings us to what is usually ignored in science: God. Since I am a Christian, this article is limited to the Christian worldview, which is centered on Jesus Christ. (Note: This section does not imply the biblical text is necessarily “true,” only that this...
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Ever since I was a child, I presumed the universe would be teeming with alien life. Star Wars and Star Trek reinforced this belief, and I yearned for the day when we would meet and communicate with other intelligent beings. But as every potential alien discovery turned out to be natural, and our initial assumptions about the chance that life can naturally emerge from non-living materials turned out to be wildly optimistic, perhaps it is time to honestly reappraise the likelihood of us ever detecting, let alone communicating with other technologically-intelligent extraterrestrial species. In this vast universe, there appear to...
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The Internet is crawling with loonie stories alleging that liberal funder George Soros is a frontman for the Rothschild banking family, in the service of a conspiracy for world government. In the 19th century, to be sure, the Rothschild bank exercised enormous power at the peak of British and French financial influence. Today the Rothschild bank in London is a boutique with annual profits of about $70 million, a rounding error in the accounts of a J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Never you mind, respond the paranoids: the Rothschilds are a hidden octopus, and the fact that we...
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Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not just incrementally superior to any other hominid or animal; we’re qualitatively different, both as the only known technologically-intelligent species and by virtue of dozens of unique abilities. It is not a claim but a demonstrable fact that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are vastly superior to every other form of life and, for whatever reason, all the genetic mutations that make us unique and confer over 40 traits and behaviors that result in evolutionary advantages over every other animal, occurred within a short period of time, within just one genus, and nowhere...
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It has become axiomatic that life naturally evolved out of nonliving materials billions of years ago. Given enough time and the chemical opportunity, living cells self-assemble. However, the experts on the development of complex molecules from simpler ones, the synthetic chemists, do not know how this process actually occurs. There are no known pathways to create the components that make up a living cell from nonliving matter. They have no idea how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and enzymes), nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA), saccharides (also called carbohydrates or sugars, the scaffolding for DNA and...
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The New Testament (NT) is the foundational religious text for over 2.2 billion people and is completely unique in one sense: It is the world's only unedited, frameless, correlative anthology. Over a period of 50 years, at least nine authors wrote 27 books containing no less than 55 major doctrines and 180 doctrinal concepts centered on one figure – Jesus Christ. Somehow, when these doctrines are grouped, whether they refer to the Pre-Mortal Jesus, Human Jesus, Resurrected Jesus, and Glorified Jesus, a single, coherent cosmology appears:
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