This video attempts to explain why one should believe the things the christian bible says, specifically because:

it's a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses, during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophesies, and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.

THESIS: The arguments and evidence presented in the video completely fail to support the above position.
It's a huge post: feel free to only tackle a specific section or 2, I think they're mostly self-contained.
In some cases I say that I suspect the speaker of being dishonest. If you don't like that, just know that he straight up calls people "ignorant, or evil, or both" [34:07] and "fools" [56:03] (stated as a fact, not merely his opinion) for using specific arguments or not accepting his conclusion. I think he opened up the Pandora's Box of guessing others' intent and so I've done it as well, though I've tried to be as responsible as possible. If you think I've been unfair, please let me know why.
TL;DR and conclusion next, for your convenience...

TL;DR & Conclusion

The speaker first presents the question: "why the bible?" (I've tried to phrase this more rigorously as: "why should anybody consider the bible authoritative on the truth of the Universe?") The speaker then presents his answer, and dissects it to address and support each claim within it.
However, his methodology for investigating the question actually rests on the premise that "there is no higher authority than the bible" (in his own words, 12:35-ish). This is a direct answer to the question he's investigating, and therefore any answer which rests on this premise is circular. I demonstrate that important portions of the speaker's argument do seem to rest on this premise and other lines of fallacious reasoning, and so his answer seems to be based on invalid reasoning and should not be trusted.
The speaker also fails to present compelling evidence for any of the claims which make up his answer, and often relies on fallacious arguments. His arguments include:

• Questionable interpretations of biblical passages: citing passages widely believed to be forgeries as if they are eyewitness testimony, and reading "between the lines" and other forms of motivated interpretation
• Unsound interpretations of the history of the bible: preferring a "very early" authorship of New Testament books, against the consensus of modern scholars and without giving any justification; and citing absence of evidence as evidence of absence (argument from silence), in a case where the old adage actually holds true
• Errors in analyzing probabilities: preferring less likely explanations over more likely ones, or not applying Occam's Razor where it would help
• Straw men, an appeal to consequences, an argument from popularity, affirming the consequent, and other fallacious arguments

Even ignoring the circularity of his methodology, the speaker fails to come close to proving his point. That's not to say he's wrong: the bible could be an authoritative source of information about the Universe, and he's just failed to piece together a valid argument which supports that position. I don't think that's the case (and I've done just a bit to rebut that position), but it's possible. However, after viewing this video and considering all the poor arguments it presents, I still think it's far more likely that christianity and its bible originated entirely due to mundane natural events, maybe akin to what's proposed here.
In my own experience, however flawed the arguments presented in this video are, I've seen them used a lot. I hope that some readers might see how to debunk an argument they consider sound, so that those folks can reconsider their position and build stronger arguments in the future.

Video Overview

First off, this video attempts to answer the question "why the bible?" In the context of the video it's pretty clear what he means, but it's vague out of context, so I'll rephrase it more rigorously:
"Why should anybody consider the bible authoritative on the truth of the Universe?"
For the most part the video is a systematic dissection of the speaker's position.

The "Egregious Flaw" in Methodology

At [12:35] the speaker says the following, to rebut the objection that 'proving the bible using the bible constitutes circular reasoning'. He's trying to get in front of this objection because most of his reasoning is, in fact, an attempt to prove the bible using the bible.

The question is "why I choose to believe the bible". ... The answer to that question for me resides in the bible itself. Now why would I appeal to the bible in this way? Because there is no higher authority than the bible. See, if I were to appeal to another authority, then I would be conceding that there is a higher authority than the bible. So this might be a problem in any other area, and any other field -- however, I'm making the argument that this is the higher authority, and therefore by definition I cannot appeal to another authority.

He asks the question "why do I consider the bible authoritative?", and he investigates it under the premise that "there is no higher authority than the bible". The main premise underlying his entire investigation is a direct answer to the question he's investigating: this is the definition of circular reasoning.
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But doesn't he make a good point? Wouldn't any other premise corrupt his investigation and bar him from reaching the conclusion that "there is no higher authority than the bible"?
No, that's ridiculous, and here's why...
For one thing, when the speaker says that his question is different from any other question in any other field, and yet fails to give a sufficient explanation for how it's different -- that's special pleading. Sure, maybe it's impossible to investigate whether any given thing is the ultimate authority. But even if that's the case, it doesn't make circular arguments valid.
Including an answer as a premise forces one to interpret all the evidence in a manner consistent with the premise, or to only consider evidence that's consistent with the premise -- which of course forces the investigation to reach the conclusion stated in the premise. That's what a premise is: a foundational assumption which guides all subsequent reasoning. It is not constraining in any way to assume that a thing might not be authoritative, in order to investigate whether or not it is authoritative -- it's the only honest way to investigate any question.
The speaker should be more than willing to assume that he might be wrong, and then undertake a fair investigation from there. If he's right and the bible is the ultimate authority on the Universe, then he can only demonstrate that by comparing it to extrabiblical reality. And again, if he's right, everything in the Universe should agree with the bible -- and even the nay-sayers ought to accept that as proof!
Why is he unwilling to strike the killing blow to his opponents' arguments, if he's certain that he's right?
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In the following sections I'll show how this circular reasoning appears to lead the speaker back to his assumed conclusion.

The Speaker's Answer

Presented at 11:05: see very top for quote.
I'll address it claim by claim, as done by the speaker...

Claim 1: "... it's a reliable collection of historical documents ..."

At 15:08, the speaker cites the following as evidence in for this claim:

• The bible was written on 3 different continents
• In 3 different languages
• By over 40 authors from multiple walks of life: kings, generals, fishermen, tax collectors, doctors, historians
• In 66 volumes, covering hundreds of subjects
• Over more than 1500 years

So what? In all these ways it's similar to the Hindu scriptures, but does the speaker give any credence to those? Though he does mention other religious texts [3:57] and even presents them as alternatives to the bible, he doesn't discuss these so-called "strengths" of the Hindu scriptures (or any others) in his lecture: I think either he's unaware of them, or his premise -- that the christian bible is the highest authority -- has caused him to exclude Hindu and other scriptures from his investigation, because analyzing them the same way he analyzed the bible would cast doubt on his assumed conclusion. So, "why the bible?" when the Hindu scriptures and perhaps others are so similar in the ways the speaker cares about? Who knows? He didn't address it, though he should have.
But even if there were nothing remotely comparable to the bible in these ways -- why should it matter? Does the number of languages used to compose something somehow affect is authority? For that matter, does composing one work on the corner of 3 continents somehow make it more authoritative than another one composed on the edge of the Indian subcontinent, or in the middle of North America? And why should we care how many people wrote it, or their backgrounds, or how many separate books it's composed of, or how long it took to write?
I know what he's getting at: he's trying to say, "how could this many people, over such a long time, across such large swathes of multiple societies, all be wrong in the same way?" Well, that's a fallacy called 'argumentum ad populum', an argument from popularity. Just because a bunch of people believe something, that doesn't make it true, or even likely to be true. All the bible authors were Jews and early christians living in Eastern Mediterranean societies; they were well aware of earlier Jewish oral and written traditions, and likely tried to constrain their work to enhance rather than refute the existing traditions; and the works which weren't popular or didn't agree with existing traditions were not included as canon! The bible's internal consistency (such as it is) doesn't indicate that its contents are true -- it indicates that its authors prioritized internal consistency.
The speaker has made an argumentum ad populum, derived from evidence heavily affected by sample selection bias and observer bias. It's a terrible argument, built on terrible evidence. After a bit of thought, anybody who isn't operating under the speaker's circular premise should be able to see the problems with this argument.
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At 17:40, the speaker seems to claim that the author of Luke was a historian, and that we should trust them at their word when they make claims, because as a historian they researched the claims before publishing them:

Luke was not an eyewitness -- he doesn't claim to be an eyewitness. He's a historian who claims to have traced the information from the eyewitnesses. ... The fact that this man was not an eyewitness, but collected information from individuals who were eyewitnesses [...], and has followed everything closely for some time past, and he wanted to write an orderly account. ... Luke's goal is history and chronology.

Well, Luke probably wasn't a historian in any modern sense of the word, so "history and chronology" in any modern sense probably weren't his real goal. Modern historical research didn't really happen in ancient times, so I'm reluctant to accept that when the author of Luke says he has "followed all things closely for some time past", he actually means he's found enough objective evidence to support the claims he's heard. It's not what he explicitly says, and that was not the common practice at the time, so I find it hard to believe that's what he meant.
Also, I don't think Luke 1:1-4 (cited by the speaker) implies that Luke tried at all to investigate the claims he received from others. Instead, this passage can easily mean that the author of Luke was told some stuff by people who claimed to be eyewitnesses, and he's just writing those things down because he believes them based on the story alone. It's not even clear that the author talked to the eyewitnesses -- he could have just talked to the "ministers" in verse 2, who told him they got it from eyewitnesses.
The Lucan author could be recounting pure hearsay, 100 retellings deep, as if it's fact -- or he could have gone to the ends of the Earth to verify what he heard. But he doesn't describe his sources or methods, so we don't know, and it's hazardous to guess... Yet the speaker hazards a guess, and tries to pass off that guess as truth. In this case, I think he's forcing his interpretation of the passage to match his assumed conclusion, and to do so he's made a lot of seemingly unwarranted assumptions.
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Then at 27:47 the speaker says this:

"There have been more than 25,000 archaeological digs related directly to the subject matter of the bible. ... Not one of them has contradicted anything that we have in the bible, and the overwhelming majority of them have confirmed and affirmed the things that we find in the bible."

First off, I don't accept this claim at face value -- I'd like to see some citations, but the speaker doesn't give any. Also, biblical claims like the Genesis flood have been thoroughly debunked (though I think archaeology only played a small part). I bet a lot of archaeology has proved parts of the bible wrong, and Wiki seems to agree with me so I think I'm right to doubt the speaker's claim. But that's irrelevant to the point I'm going to make, so I'll move on...
I accept that some places and events in the bible are factual. That's no problem. These were people writing about their society and their time, so it would be ridiculous if nothing in the bible were factual. But the fact that it contains some facts does not imply that all its contents are facts.
"My name is Andrew Joslin. I live in the United States. I have black hair. I love cats."
Those 4 statements are internally consistent, and 3 of them are true -- so does that mean they all are? No. One of them is false.
In just the same manner, some things in the bible can be true, and verified by archaeology and science, while other things in the bible might be false. Just because we verified the Babylonian Captivity with reasonable certainty (Jer 52), that doesn't at all support the claim that a deity had anything to do with it (Jer 52:2-3).

Claim 2: "... written by eyewitnesses ..."

First off, from 19:31 - 20:50, the speaker very strongly implies that he thinks the traditional authors -- the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, John -- are the real authors of the 4 gospels. Over and over he says "Matthew is writing...", "his favorite words are...", "that's why we have his gospel written the way it's written", and other phrases which make it very unlikely that he is personifying the books, and far more likely that he is talking about the authors themselves and believes they are the same as the tradition says. But those authors are merely the church tradition, and this tradition is very much doubted by modern scholars.
Additionally, multiple times in the video [13:54, 40:30] he cites 2 Peter as if it's authoritative on what Peter experienced and thought. But modern scholars believe this book to be a forgery and not written by Peter, so I don't know why anybody would consider 2 Peter authoritative on what Peter experienced or thought. If 2 Peter is a forgery then the reference at 51:20 is also problematic, because I suspect that a person who forges a book by Peter may also be so bold as to claim that all scripture is divine in origin, as an attempt to give more credence to their own forgery.
All this makes me wonder how much the speaker actually knows about how the bible was written -- and if he does know what modern scholarship says about these things, I wonder whether he might just be throwing out the modern scholarly consensus in favor of his personal, pet beliefs (his premise that the bible is the ultimate authority). Neither is a good option, and either way you cut it this lowers my trust in the speaker.
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Finally, at 21:20 the speaker claims that John was an eyewitness to... something. He cites John 1:1-3 to support this:

1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

Okay, the author clearly says that he has both seen and heard certain, unnamed things, which have apparently convinced him of the truth of the message he is about to relay in the rest of his gospel.
I grant that the author is saying he "saw and heard" things -- but what? It seems like poetic language, and it doesn't make any distinction between the things the author has personally seen, and what he has heard second- or third- or nth-hand from others. True, the author may have personally experienced some stuff as an eyewitness, but it's unclear from these verses what that stuff was, and how much of the remainder of this gospel is hearsay versus eyewitness testimony. I'm not even sure that the author of John ever claims to have seen Jesus -- perhaps the rest of John proves me wrong, but from this passage it's entirely possible that the things the author experienced firsthand were more akin to what modern parishioners experience in church, than to personally witnessing the things Jesus said and did. People today say they are convinced by their own experiences without ever having seen Jesus in the flesh, so perhaps that's what the author of John is saying in this passage.
But even if the gospel of John were eyewitness testimony, that's still not great... Wiki says that "most scholars believe that John reached its final form around AD 90–110", so this would be eyewitness testimony that is, per most scholars, at least 57 years old at the time it was written down. We know for a fact that eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable. This study demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitness testimony for a somewhat mundane event. These are known cases where mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony resulted in a wrongful conviction and death row sentence, and here's a study which indicates that high stress negatively impacts the quality of eyewitness testimony (specifically, it affects the eyewitness's ability to accurately recall the events).
If a crucifixion of a man named Jesus or Jeshua did indeed happen, then eyewitnesses to that event might have had some difficulty accurately retelling what they saw, even the first time they retold the story. This could be compounded with the eyewitnesses having heard rumors that he was a prophet, which might render their interpretation of what they saw vulnerable to suggestion. The long time period between the writing of this gospel and the events it describes is also problematic, because during that time it was passed on as an oral tradition, and continued retelling as a shared oral tradition can cause the recalled experiences to degrade in accuracy and become poisoned by later changes. That's how memory recall works: it's subject to errors and changes each time we do it. It happens to everybody, and to individuals as well as groups. It's not necessarily lying: errors can and do accumulate very quickly despite people's best intentions to be truthful.
So from the passages presented by the speaker, it's far from a certainty that the author of John was an eyewitness to the events described in the gospel of John. And even if he were, eyewitness testimony is extremely problematic, and frankly I'd consider it more likely that this eyewitness testimony has been corrupted by the factors described above, than the purported supernatural events in the story actually happened as described. Maybe there's more evidence to be found in John, but I find the speaker's use of this passage alone insufficient to support his argument: to call this evidence is wishful thinking or motivated interpretation at best.

Claim 3: "... during the lifetime of other witnesses ..."

At 23:22, in support of this claim the speaker says there's a huge problem "dating the problem late". I don't know what problem he's referring to, because he didn't explain it as far as I could tell. He then cites 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 as support for "... during the lifetime of other witnesses ..." -- however, in those verses Paul explicitly says that he's recounting a story he's been told. I've heard some speculation as to whether this may be some type of early christian creed, in which case it would have been meant as a statement of faith, rather than a discussion of facts in evidence (I find this plausible, but I can't back it up with evidence so I'm treating it as mere speculation).
But all speculation aside, in 1 Corinthians 15:1-7 Paul literally admits that he is not personally attesting to the veracity of what he's saying: he's repeating something he was told. Obviously he is personally attesting his own experience in verse 8, but all the rest is stuff that he was told and cannot attest to personally.
So Paul was told that "the 500" and a bunch of other people witnessed the resurrected Jesus, and that most of them are still alive. Therefore, when the speaker later [24:22] says this:

"If you do the math, there are at least 301 eyewitness to the resurrection who are alive when 1 Corinthians was written.

... I don't think the speaker has any justification to reach this conclusion. Even if Paul believed it was true, does that mean we should believe it? Again, Paul need not be lying here, nor do his sources need to be lying, in order for this passage to be a falsehood. Everybody in the chain from the eyewitness(es) to Paul could be doing their best to report the events accurately, and they could still have gotten it wrong.
Not knowing how long the chain from the eyewitness(es) to Paul actually was, again I'd say it's far less likely that the events described in the story are true, than that the message Paul delivers here was corrupted by false memories and erroneous retellings -- or even outright lies or exaggeration*** -- and therefore false. (***We don't know the pedigree of the story before it reached Paul, so we can't say that every middle-man retelling of it was honest. Even if you would die defending Paul's honesty, that still says nothing for all the people in the chain that passed this information to him.)
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The speaker uses these verses again at 29:06, where he says this:

But what we find here in this text is, again, over 301 eyewitnesses to the resurrection who were still alive when 1 Corinthians was written. Why is this important? This is important because that means that the gospel message, that the message of the bible, is falsifiable. ... When you're testing the veracity of a claim, if somebody's making a claim and that claim can't be falsified, that means you can't test the claim. Not a very strong claim, if you can't test the claim -- that means I just gotta trust you, because there's nothing I can do to falsify your claim, I just gotta trust you. This claim is falsifiable. When Paul wrote it, it was a falsifiable claim, and yet it was never falsified. That's a piece of evidence that has to be weighed.

First off, even if the claim was falsifiable at the time it was made, it's not falsifiable now, and now is when we are being asked to believe the claim. People of Paul's time may have been able to interrogate these supposed eyewitnesses, but we can't -- and we can't even be sure they ever existed -- so their testimony can't falsify Paul's account for us. It's unfortunate that the evidence we need to falsify Paul's claims may be lost to time -- but that doesn't mean we should believe what he says, and as far as we can tell it actually renders his claims unfalsifiable to us. Per the speaker's own logic, this is a good reason to doubt what Paul says.
Second, as explained above, I don't accept that there were "over 301 eyewitnesses to the resurrection" still alive in time to read 1 Corinthians. Even if there were living eyewitnesses at that time, the following problems must be overcome before claiming this as evidence:

• Maybe 1 Corinthians wasn't published anywhere these eyewitnesses could have seen it, in time for them to falsify it. It's a letter to the church of Corinth (far from Judea, where we'd expect most eyewitnesses to remain), written in a language foreign to them (Greek), at a time when few people could read
• Maybe eyewitnesses saw it and didn't falsify it because it matched their (incorrect) understanding of what happened. It is possible for everybody to be wrong in roughly the same ways, that's how witness collusion and legends work
• Maybe eyewitnesses saw it and did falsify it -- but one of the following happened:
  • They chose to leave the area instead of risking voicing their objections to a popular belief
  • Their objections were overshadowed by the louder and more numerous voices which ended up informing the books of the bible
  • They voiced their objections verbally and never wrote them down
  • Their written objections were lost over the centuries (including the purposeful destruction of "heretical" texts by the church, rulers, and individuals)
  • We just haven't found the document yet

All of the above are perfectly reasonable explanations for why we don't have a specific, ancient document in our hands.
Also, for what it's worth, I'd like to mention that here the speaker is literally using absence of evidence as evidence of absence: this is an argument from silence, and it's fallacious here because it affirms the consequent by completely ignoring other very plausible explanations. Arguments from silence are perfectly fine when the absence of the thing necessarily implies the falsehood of the claim: for example, the claim "I have a green horn sticking out of my forehead" is falsified by the absence of a green horn sticking out of my forehead. Arguments from silence also be okay evidence (though not very conclusive) when there are good reasons to believe that if the claim were true we should likely have the evidence we lack. But here it is a no-no because what we know about the production, preservation, etc., of ancient documents gives us the most likely explanation for why we don't have the evidence.
So yeah, that's a horribly fallacious argument... And this one's obvious enough, and the speaker seems intelligent enough, that I'm going to just say it: of all the arguments the speaker makes, this is the one that most makes me suspect dishonesty. Maybe he's chosen to present this paper tiger in place of a good argument because he knows he has nothing better. It makes me suspect he's consciously chosen not to investigate his question, but instead seeks to prove his foregone conclusion by any means necessary.
Not that he's outright lying -- I think he really does believe his foregone conclusion. But I think he hasn't set out to honestly investigate it, and this awful argument is, in my opinion, a direct result of that flaw in his methodology.
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At 30:44 the speaker states that the NT was written "very early", which I guess is supposed to support the "by eyewitnesses, in the lifetime of other eyewitnesses" prong of his answer. Yet he gives no evidence for this "very early" claim. I think these are the points where he tries to support the argument, but both seem to be non sequiturs (fallacies):

• At 31:30 the speaker argues against a straw man of the popular "telephone game" argument
  • It's a straw man because the telephone game argument is a description of how both transcription and translation errors accumulate in hand-copied texts over time -- however, the speaker presents it as if everybody who ever translated the bible had the same source material to translate or transcribe from. That's simply not true. It's been proven that differences exist in the earliest known copies of every book of the bible, and these differences grew over time. Medieval scribes didn't have the originals to copy or translate from: they were working from copies of copies of copies, etc. Indeed, Bart Ehrman says that the earliest scribes tended to make more errors than the later ones.
  • It's a non sequitur, because it was brought up in the context of trying to prove that the NT was authored "very early", and it actually has nothing to do with that, so it's probably a relevance fallacy of some type. The "telephone game" argument explains how copies of copies become less and less true to the originals. It does not comment on the date of the originals, yet that's what the speaker is trying to prove here.
• At 34:54 the speaker claims that we have over 6000 manuscripts or fragments of the NT, which is more than we have for other ancient texts of similar age
  • This is a non sequitur for a number of reasons, at least one of them a relevance fallacy. First, the books cited by the speaker are generally quite a bit older than the books of the NT -- by many hundreds of years, in some cases. Second, the number of fragments has nothing to do with when the books were written, which is the point the speaker is trying to prove.

I feel that these two arguments actually distract the audience rather than supporting the speaker's claim. I don't know whether this was his intent, or a mistake, or I'm just being dumb -- mainly because I have no idea how he thinks these points support his claim. At the very least they distracted me, and after re-watching them multiple times I still couldn't make any better sense of these arguments than as non sequiturs based on straw men.
If you think he's supported his "very early" NT authorship claim at all with these points, then please let me know how.
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But regardless of my poor understanding of this section of the video, or the speaker's lack of evidence, or whatever happened here, I don't think it even matters. Even if the NT books were written "very early", it would not mean that the lack of contemporaneous objections to the NT's claims constitutes evidence in favor of the NT's claims. Again, arguments from silence are not appropriate here, and I really do suspect that the speaker is being intellectually dishonest here, as discussed toward the beginning of this section.

Claim 4: "They report supernatural events that took place ..."

At 40:30 the speaker cites 2 Peter in support of this claim. Aside from the problems I already mentioned with 2 Peter, and how (in my opinion) the speaker's usage of that book diminishes his credibility --
Why would it matter that the authors claim that supernatural events happened? Should we just... believe them? It's one thing to say "I saw X". It's another entirely to say "I saw X, and I know that Y caused it". The first is a statement of one's own experience, whereas the second is an experience plus an inference. Why should we believe that these peoples' inferences about the supernatural are reliable, and that the reported events (assuming they actually occurred) were actually supernatural?
Note that my objection isn't based on demeaning ancient peoples. I don't think this problem really gets any easier with more knowledge. Inferences about the supernatural should always be treated as speculation, until and unless we find some way to objectively investigate the supernatural. We don't have a way to do that now, so we should not believe the claims (yet).
More support for this claim is given at 41:33, but it suffers from the same problem.
The speaker should be treating these claims as what they are -- claims, which need to be substantiated before anybody should believe them. He's not doing that. I don't know if he just doesn't suspect that they could be wrong, or if he's turning a blind eye to a problem he's aware of. Either way, it's just very unsatisfying, and consciously or not I wonder whether his circular premise "there is no higher authority than the bible" has crept into this part of his analysis, too.

Claim 5: "... in fulfillment of specific prophesies ..."

The speaker supports this argument with Isaiah 53 at 43:02, and with Psalm 22 at 45:44.
I read Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12, and to me it's not that impressive. It's not a specific prophesy, because it doesn't tell when the thing will happens, and many people (and even whole nations) of that area and timeframe probably fit that description. Jesus is just the guy that got super popular (though he was not the only one).
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I agree that Psalm 22 seems to describe somebody being crucified. Or it could be another method of torture that I don't know of, but let's just assume it's crucifixion for the sake of argument. However, it shares the same problems as Isaiah 53: it doesn't give any specifics, so it could be talking about literally anybody from that time and place who was crucified. Jesus quoting the first line while on the cross could easily have been a detail made up by the gospel authors (or the people who participated in the oral tradition), as a way to heighten the image of Jesus as the messiah. They wanted to tell a compelling story, and that would be a great way to make it more compelling to a Jewish audience.
Anyway, the speaker says that at the time of writing Psalm 22, crucifixion had not yet been invented -- but he didn't cite any sources so I don't know if he's right or wrong. I looked it up quickly, and Wiki says "The psalms making up the first two-thirds of the psalter are predominantly pre-exilic and the last third predominantly post-exilic", I think referring to the Babylonian Exile from 586-539 BCE. Since I can't read Wiki's reference I don't know if Psalm 22 is in that pre-exile group, but I'd guess so, and that's the most generous assumption I can make so let's work with that. That gives us an early 6th Century BCE date as the latest possible date for Psalm 22 being written down...
... And here's a reference saying the Persians were crucifying people "systematically" in the 6th Century BCE, and that they probably got the idea from the Assyrians and Babylonians, so those countries may have been doing it earlier than that. So contrary to the speaker's bald assertion, there's some plausible overlap (as far as I can tell) between when Psalm 22 was first written down, and when crucifixions were performed in the region. Yes, I'm working off of the manuscript date rather than the actual date it was composed, but I think that's fine: Psalm 22 began as an oral tradition, and perhaps the crucifixion details were added into it before it was written down, once people became aware of the practice. I think that's far more likely than Psalm 22 being a prophesy, and since we can't reconstruct the original oral tradition we'll just have to wonder.
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Also, prophesy in general has a few big problems:

1. People who know of the prophesy can work to fulfill it
2. People retelling a story can alter the details of the story to make it seem like the prophesy was fulfilled
3. It's sometimes not clear whether something is a prophesy at all, or what is being prophesied

Both "fulfilled prophesies" cited by the speaker suffer from all these problems.
The authors of the New Testament obviously knew the OT books well, and were motivated to make Jesus seem like the Hebrew messiah -- that's why they wrote the gospels in the first place. That would give them a strong incentive to either make up parts of the gospel stories wholesale to better match the prophesies, or to selectively interpret the things they heard or experienced in a way that makes the events fit the prophesy better.
And even if there wasn't much embellishment, couldn't it be that Jesus and the apostles actively worked to fulfill as much of those "prophesies" as possible? A great quote from Matt Dillahunty: "If I go to a restaurant and order a steak medium rare, and the server gives me exactly that, is he fulfilling prophesy?" In my opinion, nope, he's merely following instructions, just like Jesus and the apostles may have merely been following a script. I understand that some people might still call this "fulfilling prophesy", but given the other 2 problems I think this idea of "fulfilled prophesies" is still on super thin ice.
Finally, Isaiah 53 is often interpreted by Jews as a prophesy for the nation of Israel, not the messiah. And I think they believe Psalm 22 is just a poem or song, not a prophesy. You can claim they're prophesies, but it's not clear that they were intended to be, or what exactly they predict, so when they're "fulfilled" (especially as questionably as in this case) I'm not sure how much that really means.
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This isn't a great case for the "... in fulfillment of specific prophesies ..." claim. It looks like wishful thinking to me, again perhaps motivated by the speaker's premise that the bible is the ultimate authority. Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody here can do a better job supporting this position than the speaker did.

Claim 6: "... and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin."

At 51:20, the speaker cites 2 Peter 1 to support the claim that the bible authors claimed their writings are divine in origin. I've already noted my objections to using 2 Peter (a likely forgery) as evidence for anything that Peter the apostle experienced or thought --
But just as with claims for supernatural events, even if 2 Peter is not a forgery, why would it matter that the authors claim the bible is divine in origin? As discussed above I think it's very unlikely that Psalm 22 or Isaiah 52/53 are fulfilled prophesies, so now where are we?
We're left without any supporting evidence for the claim. They said it, so should we just believe it? As with claim 4, this is just very unsatisfying, and I wonder whether the speaker's circular premise had something to do with it.

Final Bones to Pick

I wish I could address his points at 52:12 and 53:15, even though they're not directly related to the rest of the talk -- but I'm out of space.
The first is an appeal to consequences built on an equivocation fallacy, and in the second he describes the questions one must ask in any historical investigation -- questions which he addressed poorly or not at all in this video.
These two attempts to twist logic into a shape that supports his point -- well, they disgust me.

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Herod opened his eyes, groaned, and rolled onto his side. He got his faceplate open fast enough to avoid spraying it with vomit when his internals suddenly convulsed.
Clear fluid mixed with digital code that was suspended in the thick viscous fluid.
He hacked and choked a minute more, than slowly pushed himself into a sitting position.
"Took you long enough," a woman's voice said.
Herod nearly screamed. He'd forgotten about the human woman. He slapped his faceplate closed and looked over to where she'd sat down on the floor, her back against the wall.
She was staring at him, her head cocked to the right slightly, one eyebrow raised, looking concerned but slightly amused. Herod noticed that the way she sat, with her legs open, seemed almost deliberately and lewdly provocative.
"So what did you eat that left behind garbled computer code?" she asked.
"Don't know. Things are a little confused," Herod said. He took a pull off of his water, ignoring the taste of lilacs, swished his mouth out and swallowed.
"You aren't human, are you?" she asked. She closed her legs, pulled her knees up to her chest, laced her fingers over her knees, and put her chin on her knees.
Herod shook his head. "No. I'm a digital sentience."
"So, a robot?" she asked.
Herod frowned. "No."
"Like... an android?"
"God, no. Those guys are complete assholes and kill anyone they come across. Be glad I'm not an android," Herod said.
"Wait, like a Terminator? Only instead of hunting Sarah Connor you're a maintenance man?" she asked, smiling slowly. "Or are you just some kind of jumped up disc defragger walking around in an Erector set?"
Herod understood exactly zero of the references except the defrag part.
"No."
"So, an artificial intelligence in a heavy repair body," she guessed.
"That's insulting," he snapped. "I don't call you a meat bag or a fleshy."
She shrugged. "It has no cultural connotations to me, feel free. Words only have the meaning society proscribes to them and only as much power over an individual as that individual gives them."
"I'm a digital sentience," Herod said. He stood up and looked down at Wally, who blinked at him. "We have work to do."
The human woman stood up smoothly, shrugging as she did so. "If you say so."
"We need to get you a hazardous environment suit. It's dangerous out there," Herod said. He moved up to the door and turned the handle, feeling the complex latch system inside the door move as smooth as butter.
"Sure," the human said.
Herod moved out to the control room, looking it over, committing it to memory.
"Are we it? Are we the entire repair team?" the human asked.
"Yes," Herod said. He moved over to the emergency supply room, opening the door and looking in inside.
He jerked back with a scream as a pair of dessicated bodies fell out, still holding onto each other. Their faces and necks were ragged and torn, their mouths still open in silent screams. Two flickering transparent version of the two combatants surged out of the room, through Herod, leaving him shuddering and shivering, down on his knees with Wally patting him on the back.
The human woman moved over and knelt down, staring at the two.
"Evidence of cerebral trauma, dentation matches wounds on opposite, dried blood around fingers and on hands," she said, kneeling down. She put her hands between the two bodies and pulled them away from each other.
"Phasic Energy Section," she read off the nametags. "Red stripes on one's legs, black on the other," she turned over their hands. "No calluses common to martial artists or those who have lived a martial life, no tool calluses. Computer workers or secretarial pool," she stood up, slapping her hands together. "An event caused a mass psychosis due to neural trauma and cognitive disruption. They each victimized the other even as they were victimized by some outside force. Doubtful it was a bioweapon or even a chemical weapon, as I didn't see any sores around the mouth or nose or eyes, no discoloration of the skin, and no smells that match known chemical weapons."
Herod looked up at her.
"Stand up, Pinocchio," she laughed. "I get that it was scary."
Herod got up, putting one hand against the wall, staring at her. "Didn't you see them?"
The human woman looked down at the bodies. "Yes. I just analyzed for them. Pay attention, Speedy, I don't want you to get Prime Law conflicts here."
"No, the temporal shades," Herod said. He coughed for a minute, trying to ease the ache in his chest.
"Didn't see anything," she mused. "Maybe I didn't observe in the right time?"
"Huh," Herod grunted. He stood up. *Sam*
No answer.
Luckily, Sam had given him the route and map to the mag-lev that would take them to the damaged section.
The human woman was already looking at the hazardous environment armor and Herod moved into the room.
"Try this one," he said, taking one down that was still in the packaging. He opened the package, handing it to her. "It's unisex, but has waste disposal systems, you should be able to wear it."
She nodded, taking the hazard suit and looking at it closely.
She only paused a second before putting it on.
"All right, do a quick self-test, sometimes these things fry out if they've been sitting too long," Herod said.
"How long has it been sitting here?" the human asked. "How long have I been gone?"
"We're not sure. There's temporal stability issues in this place," Herod said. He looked down at Wally. "If I had to estimate, it's about eight thousand years old."
"Humans look much different? Seems like every day there was a new news article about how fucked up humans would look in a hundred years, much less almost ten thousand," the human woman said, her hands moving. She grimaced. "I would have figured someone would have invented better plumbing attachments."
"Do a test," he said, tapping his own wrist.
Something about her bothered him.
She flipped up the wrist and followed Herod's directions. He corrected her twice and then did it himself, making sure he quickly connected to the suit's network and frying some firmware.
"Two red lights. Bad suit?" She asked, smiling at him.
"Bad suit," Herod said. "It happens. The power from the first test shorts something out after it registers as green," he turned and got a suit.
He missed the calculating look in her eyes as she narrowed them slightly. By the time he was turned around with another suit she was smiling again.
She dressed quickly. Herod looked then shrugged. "Have you ever trained in extreme hazardous environment armor?"
The human shook her head. "No."
"We don't have time to teach you. There's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of damage control repair autonomous systems that need brought back online to fix a lot of systems," Herod told her.
She stretched, then bent down and touched her toes, then twisted at the waist first one way then the other.
"There, fitted," she said. She looked at him. "So what do I call you, instead of HAL or Speedy?"
"Herod," the DS said.
"Roman King of Judea, circa First Century B.C.," the Terran said. "Interesting name. Did you choose it yourself or was it chosen for you?"
"I chose it when I left the digital creche I grew up in," Herod said. He motioned. "We've got to take a mag-lev train. It's about a three hour ride."
"You grew up, weren't programmed fully formed?" she asked.
"I told you, I'm a digital sentience, not an AI," he snapped.
"Core life coding, then exposed to digital experiences and stimulus to form a unique being. Less artificial intelligence or digital intelligence and more pure energy being that can only exist in a dedicated electronic ecosystem," she mused.
"Pure energy beings are different," Herod said, frowning slightly as they wound their way out of the mat-trans facility.
"Like those Temporal Shades you mentioned. Those are pure energy beings. What kind of energy?" she asked.
"Phasic energy residue," Herod said.
"Caused by massive psychological trauma," she said. She was quiet for a second. "Phasic... phasic energy is psychic energy, isn't it?"
Herod nodded. "Yes."
"Psychic powers are an illusion. The amount of energy it would take to simply move a matchstick across a table with mental powers would require more bio-electric energy than the human body could store or handle, much less the human brain," the woman said. "Phasic energy is what psychic powers use?"
Herod sighed. "Yes," he stood there, waiting for the door to rise. "Phasic energy exists between two sub-quantum particle layers. Humans have a part in their brains that allows them to direct the energy."
"Sounds like bullshit to me," the woman said. "You'd find phasic channeling fibers in the brain and body of anyone able to use it."
"Like in Mantid bladearms and upper caste Mantid neural tissue," Herod said, dredging up a memory from school.
"So why didn't humans run around blasting each other with psychic powers for all of history?" the woman asked. "Seems like being able to melt each other's brains with psychic powers would have slowed down technological progression. No need to make a bow or a gun if you can just mind blast the other guy, Herod."
"Humans suppress and disrupt psychic powers in others around them. We found that out during the Terra/Mantid War," Herod said. He paused. "Did you work here?"
She shook her head. "No. I worked in a high security facility. My work is classified."
"We're inside a Dyson sphere, that's inside another Dyson sphere, that's wrapped around another Dyson sphere," he said. "It's called a Matrioshka brain and used for systems where sheer computing power is preferable to signal propagation."
"How big?" She asked. Herod noticed her eyes were particularly intent.
"The one we're on is roughly five hundred sixty two million mile radius," Herod said.
She narrowed her eyes again, then smiled. "That's big. How long did it take to make?"
"That doesn't really have a meaning here," Herod said. "It used self-replicating robotic systems to build each shell."
"What happened to the robots when the shell was completed? An orgy of destruction with the last one shoving the rest into a trash compactor and jumping in?" the human woman asked.
"We don't know," Herod admitted.
"Might want to find out," she smiled. "So, I'm warned, I'll be looking at something outside of my experience, and there will be a roof over my head. How far from me?"
"There will be one or more suns, moving through magnetic fields that will polarize to simulate night time. Those will be exactly ninety-five million miles from both this inside layer and the outside layer of the sphere inward from us," he warned.
"So, alien landscape. Got it," she smiled. She held up her hands. "I guess we better get going. Maybe I can help you repair things."
"Doubt it," Herod said, stepping outside. "This is pretty high tech stuff."
He missed the flicker of pure rage on the human woman's face.
When he turned around, she was looking up into the sky, her eyes narrowed. He watched her eyes moving rapidly, scanning the whole sky. She then slowly moved in circles, looking around her, and he frowned behind his polarized visor as he noticed she was only looking down a minute amount each time.
"How did you beat the magnetic issues for a mag-lev?" she asked at one point, mid-turn, pointing at a far off train that was slowly (to his perception) moving by.
"Monopole magnets and superconductors," Herod said.
"Hm," she said.
Herod sighed, waiting until she was done. That was one thing he hated about working with fleshys, they took forever to do anything that required mental exercise.
"The mag-lev is only a mile away. We'll take the travolator," Herod said, walking toward the entry station for the moving sidewalk.
"Be faster to walk," she said, looking around her as they moved toward the entry area. "Lots of dead bodies."
Herod stepped carefully around a trio of corpses, watching closely for any of the translucent apparitions. "The Glassing drove them mad."
The woman kicked a pair of desiccated corpses out of the way as she just moved forward, making Herod frown. She didn't seem to care about the dead.
"Don't do that," he said.
"What, they're dead," she smiled.
"Yes. Don't do that. Don't disturb them," he said.
"Fine," she said, walking around a corpse. "Better?"
"Thank you," the DS said.
"Funny that you'd say that, Herod, seeing as you're not human and you probably don't usually have a body. Is mortality a thing for you?" she asked.
"Yes. Eventually my core life strings will be too fragmented and I'll suffer core software failure," he said. "And no, I can't just be restored from an earlier backup, that's not how we work."
"Sloppy engineering," she muttered. She skirted around the weaving queue area while Herod walked back and forth along the line. "So what made them all go batshit insane?"
"The Great Glassing," Herod repeated.
"You said that, Herod. Why would aliens attacking Earth make everyone go crazy?" she asked.
Herod stepped onto the moving sidewalk, wishing she would be quiet. "The Mantid pushed the death experiences of everyone through SolNet and the SoulNet, every survivor had to withstand the death of billions," he told her as she stepped onto the moving sidewalk and then walked up to stand next to him. "Roughly half of the survivors went catatonic and never woke up. Two thirds of the remaining half became the Screaming Ones, attacking everyone around them in their agony."
He ended up explaining SoulNet, SolNet, and the SUDS system to her, staring off into the distance at the strange buildings and structures they passed. Once they got away from the Mat-Trans area the system smoothly put them on a high speed walk, moving them at close to a hundred miles an hour.
The whole time she listened, asking pertinent questions.
She seemed really interested in the SUDS system.
Together they got on the mag-lev train, sitting down after Herod punched in the transit code number. He looked at the ETA and looked at the human woman.
"It's going to take nine hours to get there. Sleep if you can," he said.
"I'm starting to get hungry," she smiled. She opened her faceplate and lit a cigarette. "These help, but I'm going to need food soon."
"I'll find some when I wake up," he said. He checked the mag-seal on his toolkit then looked at Wally. "I'm going to defrag. Wake me if anything bad happens."
Wally made a beeping tune and nodded, blinking his eye shields.
Herod closed his eyes.
------------------
"Herod, don't move, just move your awareness up," Sam's voice said.
Herod just brought his awareness almost fully up, leaving himself disconnected from his body. "What's going on, Sam?"
"What did you learn about our newest member?" Sam asked.
Herod thought, then quickly ran through his memories. He was surprised. He knew almost nothing ab out her.
"She said she worked in a secure location, on classified work. She got in the mat-trans, there was a stuttering, and she arrived here. She didn't know about the Great Glassing, I don't think anyway, but she knows Confederate Standard. She seems really interested in the mat-trans and SUDS systems," Herod said.
"So, we don't know anything," Sam sighed. "I checked her visual appearance against what little records are left. She didn't come up as a match."
Herod avoided smiling. "I've got good news for you. I left you a DNA sample in the mat-trans facility."
"Really? How?" Sam asked.
"I had her put in the catheter in one of the suits, shorted out the suits radio and beacon, and had her change suits," Herod said. "That'll give you DNA."
There was silence for a minute. "That was a good idea. Give me a few to check on it. I'll have to send in a bot."
"What's she doing now?" Herod asked.
Sam paused. "According to the cameras, she explored the train, busted open a vending machine, and gorged on the food inside. She's currently sitting across and down from you, looking out the window and smoking a cigarette."
"Oh, she said she was hungry."
"That's... weird..." Sam said.
"What's weird?" Herod asked.
"Her cigarette brand. I've got the inventory of the types and brands of cigarettes available here for the Treana'ad workers and some humans. Hell, apparently adult Pubvians viewed cigarettes as.. ahem... martial aid stimulants due to the cardio-vascular effects," Sam said. He giggled, and Herod began talking to him, just talking about their work together in the Black Box under Legion, trying to ground the younger DS as he screamed and raved.
"Sorry. It's getting easier, but I feel like I'm bleeding inside somehow," Sam said. He sobbed, but managed to control himself. "Where was I?"
"Her cigarettes," Herod said.
"Yeah. I can't find the brand. You know Treana'ad, they absolutely love Terran cigarettes, they're a luxury item. 'Terran Grown and Sown!' you know?" Sam said. "And her lighter."
"What about it? I've seen a few Treana'ad with that kind of lighter," Herod said.
"It's stamped on the bottom, look," Sam said, giving Herod the image.
ZIPPO MFG. CO. BRADFORD, PA
ZIPPO
PAT. NUMBER 2032695 MADE IN THE U.S.A.
"Is that..." Herod asked, feeling a chill at the three letter abbreviation.
"Yeah. The acronym for the Hamburger Kingdom. PA is the two letter code for the state region," Sam said softly.
"That would make that thing like eight or nine thousand years old," Herod said. "Except, I've seen her use it. It works."
"It's not a modern one, watch," Sam said. He passed the image to Herod.
She flicked open the top, put her thumb on the ridged wheel, and spun it by applying pressure. Sparks flew out, the ones hitting the twisted fiber wick bringing up a blue and yellow flame.
"That's flint and steel. That fiber, that's cotton according to the sensor systems. Not synth-cotton, real cotton. That's a steel casing, I can see the imperfections in it from here," Sam said.
"Give me a spectrograph of it if you can," Herod said. "I know enough about materials to get information."
It took a minute, then a little longer while Herod waited for Sam to deal with some lost children. Sam tossed him the spectrographic image of the lighter along with other scans.
Herod was not only able to identify the metal as 'stainless steel', but that it had enough impurities to prove it was mined metals.
When Sam came back he sighed. "I got the robot to the suit. You were right, there's DNA. Looks like she nicked herself a little with the catheter tube, there was a tiny smear of blood as well as fleshy fluids. Ew," Sam said.
Herod chuckled.
"Running a DNA comparison against everyone who worked here, who had authorization to work here. It's millions of records, so it'll take a few minutes," Sam said.
"That lighter? It wasn't made with a creation engine," Herod said.
"They were in their infancy back during The Glassing," Sam said.
"It was hard manufacturing, inside a gravity well and a magnetic field. If I had to guess, I'd say it was actually manufactured on Earth," Herod said.
"Look at the cigarette pack," Herod said. "American Favorite. By the Digital Omnimessiah, those are actual relics, not forgeries."
"You need to be careful, Herod," Sam said, somewhat unnecessarily to Herod's thoughts on the matter. He paused. "Um. Oh, wow."
"What?" Herod asked.
"Her DNA. Holy shit. Um, look," he said, and tossed Herod the image.
Herod took one look at it and did the digital sentience equivalent of shake his head. "I'm not Legion, this is meaningless to me."
"Here it is compared to modern human DNA," Sam offered.
"Sam, I'm in a hazardous environment frame, I'm not using the network, just tell me. All you did was throw two plates of pasta at my brain."
"OK, they're wildly different," Sam said. "Even compared to Glassing human DNA, like the people around here, hers is really really different."
"Define... different," Herod said.
"No genetic prothesis or overlays, I can see where the Glassing DNA and the modern DNA have been modified through time, genetic drift, evolution, or genetic manipulation, but wow, her DNA is damn near off the charts. Lots of bad DNA in it, it's... it's really weird."
Herod felt a kick against his foot and heard from far away. "Hey, we're here. You said this stuff needs repaired, Speedy. First Law and all that."
"What is she referring to?" Sam asked.
"I have no idea. Maybe the Four Laws of Robotics?" Herod suggested, opening his eyes. He switched from talking on the digital frequency to his vocal cords. He looked around, the mag-lev train sitting in the station.
"Hang on, let me talk to the facility VI," Herod said, standing up.
The human woman nodded, folding her arms, exhaling smoke out of her nose.
"How bad is the damage to the phasic array automatic repair system?" he asked.
"Bad," Sam answered, obviously (to Herod) running his voice through a synthesizer.
"It isn't going to get fixed if we just stand here. Besides, I'm eager to see technology used in application of something that I was informed was make belief, confirmation bias, and attention seeking," the woman said.
"Ask her her name," Sam said.
"What am I supposed to call you? I keep forgetting to ask," Herod said.
"Miss Nee, my middle name is Tay," the human woman said, her smile getting wider. "But you can call me Dee."
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Hello all! I'm writing this post on behalf of my fiancé, who is currently in the hospital due to his severe, persistent cough that he has had for nearly 6 weeks now. Some specs on him; he is 34 (going to be 35), ~230 pounds, 5' 11"; not a smoker, pretty active (he used to run anywhere from 3-10 miles a day), doesn't have/never had asthma, and is currently employed at a warehouse that packs/ships a variety of things, everything from adhesives to aerosols.
Back in mid-November, my fiancé noticed that he had a cough and was feeling a little "off". It was a weekend and prior to going in to work on Monday, he called ahead to his supervisor, notifying him that he had a cough; given all the COVID precautions in place, his supervisor suggested that he go to a walk-in clinic to get tested for COVID. So, my fiancé did so; he got a COVID test and the result was negative. However, the doctor thought that his cough sounded a bit more like bronchitis and gave him a course of antibiotics (azithromycin) plus steroids (prednisone). They also took a chest x-ray at the time, but it came back clear (no indication of any infection or fluid in the lungs). After that doctor visit, my fiancé completely finished both courses of antibiotics and steroids, felt OK for a few days, but the cough came back.
His cough was (and had been) non-productive and felt and seemed higher up in his chest. He continued like this for a few days until he went back to the doctor, again; because the antibiotics did not seem to have worked, they figured it was viral and instead prescribed another round of steroids. The cough seemed to get worse and at times, it was slightly productive (he would sometimes cough up yellow or clear or green phlegm, but often nothing at all). He also started to get these severe coughing attacks and would cough so hard that he would gag and sometimes vomit. But, over these last 6 weeks, he's never had any other symptoms beyond the coughing; no fever, no stuffy nose, no congestion, nothing. Then, during his second round of steroids, about 3 days in, he had a very bad reaction to the steroids; he went completely pale, felt cool and clammy, could not breathe well, was wheezing, and his arms and legs began to go numb. Our doctor told us to go to the ER immediately and we did. They took his vitals, they took a blood sample, and ran another COVID test; he was completely normal, bloodwork was all normal (no elevated white blood cell count), and negative for his COVID test. They took another chest x-ray but it also came back clear. They checked his breathing (as they had in previous visits) but his lungs sounded completely clear. In time, at the ER, he was able to breathe better and they also administered an anti-anxiety medication which helped. After that, we went back home, but his cough wasn't going away, and wasn't getting any better.
After about another week, we went back to my fiancé's primary physician, again, and he prescribed, again, a round of azithromycin and prednisone. My fiancé finished both courses of those last week, but with no sign of improvement. Over the weekend, too, my fiancé had an especially bad fit of coughing and suddenly had a splitting headache; he was coughing so hard and all of sudden, he said that it "felt like part of his brain exploded." He developed a really bad migraine and was in the bed for a couple days; since then, he has had headaches on and off (my worry is some kind of a secondary coughing headache). So, we contacted my fiancé's physician again and he suggested that my fiancé get a CT scan and more bloodwork and visit with a pulmonary specialist; we got the CT scan and went to the specialist. The CT scan came back completely clean as well as his bloodwork. Everything was 100% normal, except for my fiancé's cough. It is persistent and severe; he can hardly speak a full sentence before coughing again and regularly gets bad coughing attacks. At this point, the pulmonologist strongly suggested that my fiancé be admitted to the hospital for more testing and intensive treatment in a controlled setting (just in case he had a bad reaction to anything).
Now, we're into the second day of my fiancé being in the hospital. Day 1, they gave him another course of azithromycin and a steroid (I can't recall the name, but it was not prednisone). They did a chest x-ray (came back clear), more bloodwork (came back completely normal), and a COVID test (negative). He did not improve at all in terms of his cough (even with codeine--it seems to have no effect at all on his cough); it's a persistent, nagging, kind of hacking cough, that's sometimes productive, sometimes not. On Day 1, my fiancé also had blood drawn for a pertussis test (I had been wondering if it might be whooping cough and I was relieved that they were finally testing for it). Now, on to Day 2; my fiancé is now on a different course of antibiotics and a stronger steroid (I'm forgetting both names--I'll double check). He's injected with this steroid once every 8 hours. They also did a respiratory panel today and took a sample/swab similar to the COVID test (i.e., nasopharyngeal swab from way up the nose); those results came back totally clear, no microbes detected (so, our doctor told us that pertussis is not the cause of my fiancé's coughing--I remain skeptical). And that's where we're at right now. Still, my fiancé isn't showing any signs of improvement, even after the new course of antibiotics and steroids today. NOTE: The only time that he DOES NOT cough is when he is sleeping. Once he's asleep, out is out like a light and he isn't disturbed in his sleep by coughing attacks.
So, any thoughts or suggestions? I'm totally at a loss. The only thing I can think of is perhaps some kind of environmental contaminant or exposure to something. My fiancé, as I mentioned, does work in a warehouse (although, he's been excused from work for the last 6 weeks since he started coughing). Mainly, he packs pallets and moves them around with a forklift. On occasion, he sometimes has to pack pallets with boxes from a hazardous materials room or an aerosols room; but, those materials are always sealed and packed carefully. I just wonder if he was maybe exposed to some kind of an aerosol or some other substance or dust or residue... But, the symptoms don't completely line-up. My fiancé has severe coughing, and although coughing is a symptom associated with being exposed to some kind of a substance in a workplace, it is typically a part of other symptoms with occupational asthma. My fiancé doesn't have any asthma symptoms; he can breathe fine, but the coughing can cause him to have trouble breathing when he has a coughing attack. My fiancé has two different inhalers that he was prescribed when the coughing started (a typical albuterol inhaler--which doesn't help him at all--and a symbicort inhaler--which provides very mild and temporary relief, if any). I was thinking it was pertussis at first; my fiancé last had a Tdap shot in 2013 or 2014 (he couldn't remember for sure) and although it is relatively recent, that vaccination does lose some potency over time. Although the respiratory panel that my fiancé had yesterday came back negative, I wonder what the blood test for pertussis will come back as. Anyway, I have no idea what is going on with my fiancé and the doctors seem equally confused and at a loss. Steroids, antibiotics--nothing is having any kind of effect or relief and I'm getting a little desperate for answers. I appreciate any help! Thank you!

"We'll want to minimize the amount of our tech they can get their hands on before full capitulation," Intelligence Officer Rouel noted. "To go from undetectable from a distance to an orbital communications relay network in only five hundred years suggests a remarkably high innovation score."
​
Admiral Crassock flicked an ear tuft and nodded. "The less we give them to reverse engineer, the less we'll bleed. Are there any other warning flags?"
​
"No, sir," Rouel answered. "They launch their satellites with chemical rockets. Even first generation counter-grav is more cost effective, so we can reasonably assume they don't have it. Since you can't do FTL R&D on a planet's surface without destroying it, no counter-grav means no FTL, which means no reinforcements. A separatist colony would have retained enough tech for an outward facing system defense network; a penal colony would have an inward facing one. Since this system has neither, this must be this species's homeworld."
​
"Has there been any change in the habitability report since the original survey?" the admiral asked. CRX-4 sat right in the sweet spot of the habitability assessment, with most of its landmass in the subtropical zones, but enough temperate and arctic real estate to ensure that over 90% of galactic species could live there with only adornment grade protective clothing. Only a handful of the most extreme outlier species would need more than class three environmental gear to survive somewhere on the planet. The only reason no one had snapped it up when it was first discovered was that its location was simply too remote to be practical. But borders had expanded in the intervening centuries, and now the Wingover Heromancy was close enough to claim the planet and defend that claim against any contenders.
​
"Surprisingly little," the intelligence officer answered. "They must have had their industrial revolution at an atypically low population benchmark, and learned how to clean up after themselves fairly quickly. Another indication that they have an abnormally high innovation score."
​
"What about their physiology?" Admiral Crassock asked. "It won't constrain their combat effectiveness as much as it would for a less innovative species, but it must still influence their tactics."
​
Intelligence Officer Rouel nodded. "Here, we have visuals on them." He flicked a command to the display, but then began reading off the data anyway. "Mammalian bipeds, hair sparse except on the top of the head and a few other locations that vary by individual. Moderate sexual dimorphism--subtle but enough to render co-ed sports competitions impractical for any but strictly recreational purposes. Very conflicting reports on strength and stamina, suggesting that they have a use-it-or-lose-it physiology. Atypically high resting metabolic rates, even for endotherms."
​
"Meaning that a middle of the sleep cycle surprise attack will have to be perfectly executed in order to retain the advantages of a surprise attack?" the admiral interjected.
​
"Precisely," Rouel answered. "Viviparous with a gestational period of nearly a year and roughly two decades to maturity. Birthrate appears to inversely correlate with wealth, which suggests a lack of innate control over their reproduction. It's difficult to determine their typical lifespan--hereditary and environmental factors apparently can alter it by as much as 50%; the current primary suppression of their life expectancy appears to come from a tendency toward extreme recklessness in their adolescent males."
​
"That will make ground combat...interesting..." Admiral Crossack said. "I think i'll tell the training officers to put their most creative minds on designing the practice scenarios for the ground units."
​
"With a combination of innovative and reckless, i'd suggest putting the truly diabolical minds on the air unit training scenarios," Captain Hussend said, his reptilian muzzle parting in a grin of malicious glee.
​
"Looking for an excuse to pull out that black box scenario?" Admiral Crossack asked the captain of his fleet's contingent of planetary troops. Returning his attention to the intelligence officer he asked, "Do we have to worry about attempted MAD?"
​
"FTL research is noisy enough that we'd detect it long before they managed to weaponize it." Rouel answered. "As much easier as that is than using it for travel, it's still far from easy. They do have fission reactors providing some of their power. There's no evidence that they ever tried to weaponize that technology, however; we'd see fallout scars if they'd done any testing. I'd still recommend seizing those nuclear power plants and any fuel processing facilities as quickly as possible."
​
Admiral Crossack nodded. "Unless you find something else before we arrive within targeting range of the planet, i think we'll remain in stealth mode until we're in position to take out all of their satellites simultaneously. Their ground based sensors should be sufficient for them to realize we have orbital superiority. If that isn't enough to make them surrender, it will be Captain Hussend's turn to call the shots. Do we know what they call themselves? If we're going to demand that they surrender sovereignty of their home planet, we can at least do them the courtesy of using their name for it."
​
"They call themselves 'humans'," Intelligence Officer Rouel answered. "The planet they call Ferrari. Oddly, it's the same in all twelve of their languages; perhaps it was inherited from some archaic language that is no longer used."
​
---------------------------------------
​
The initial attack went off perfectly. All of the satellites around Ferrari disintegrated within a few seconds of one another, with no wasted shots from the WHN ships. Almost as soon as they realized that all of their satellite communications were down, the humans began evacuating their civilians toward a series of massive underground bunkers.
​
"I can't tell if that's an overpowered communications laser, or a weapons test modulated to carry data to give them plausible deniability if it fails," the Communications Officer reported when the humans finally replied to the Wingover Heromancy's surrender demands.
​
"Retaliation will make them assume their weapons are strong enough to damage our ships," Captain Hussend predicted.
​
Intelligence Officer Rouel concurred. "My recommendation would be to politely ask them to dial back the power on that laser as it's clearly intended for communication over much longer distances. Imply that it's merely signal degradation due to overexposure, not anything that threatens to actually damage our receiver."
​
Admiral Crossack considered the suggestion for a few moments and then told the communications officer, "Do it."
​
After some negotiation with the humans over optimal signal strength, the transmission settled on the image of a human in what appeared to be their civilian formal wear. "President Chen, of the Faction Arbitration Council," the human identified himself. "Since you're asking for our surrender rather than simply glassing the planet, you must want it intact, which means you're going to have to come down here and take it. It would be easier to negotiate a land for tech swap--except that none of us has the authority to order everyone else to stand down. You'd have to negotiate with each faction separately if you want the whole planet. And since you opened with an attack, even if it was just on infrastructure and not personnel, rather than a diplomatic contact, half of them are going to insist that you're nothing but thieves and bullies, no matter how big an empire you might happen to have behind you.
​
"The short version," President Chen continued. "If you want this planet, you're going to have to come down here and take it."
​
"If we refrain from firing on your evacuating civilians, will you refrain from salting the Ferrari?" Admiral Crossack asked.
​
"Salting the--?" the human President's forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle out the phrase. "You mean, 'salting the earth'?"
​
"Isn't that what i said?" Admiral Crossack asked. "I understand that the connotations of synonymous words can vary, but the denotation should be similar enough for understanding. And every terrestrial species calls their planet some cognate of Fertile Soil or Solid Ground. It requires relatively advanced astronomical knowledge to realize that the planet beneath one's feet has anything in common with the wandering stars in the night sky, after all."
​
The human's eyes widened, and then his face went curiously blank. He just figured something out, and he's weighing the tactical considerations against the strategic ones, Rouel guessed silently.
​
"We won't start an atrocity contest as long as you don't," President Chen said. "Not all of our cultures agree on what does and what does not constitute war crimes, but as long as you refrain from targeting civilians and don't use biological or chemical weapons, they should all remain within the parameters of what most warriors consider an acceptable level of occupational hazard."
​
"What's the most common opinion on eating your kills?" Captain Hussend asked, displaying his mouthful of large reptilian teeth.
​
"In extremis only," President Chen answered. "There are a few superstitions that hold that eating hearts or certain other organs can be a way to appropriate your enemy's virtues, but far more of us regard it as a way of declaring your enemy to be an animal rather than a person. Cannibalism as a last ditch alternative to death by starvation will generally be overlooked, but ritual practice is not tolerated."
​
Captain Hussend nodded. "That is a common consensus among most polities and species as well. I suppose that any trophy taking would best be justifiable as preserving DNA samples to determine who is dead and who is missing once the war ends?"
​
"Oh, the nerds are going to love you," President Chen muttered. "Is there anything else we need to discuss, or is it time for you to either reconsider your invasion or else 'bring it on'?"
​
"My troops are already dropping," Captain Hussend answered with another toothy grin.
​
---------------------------------
​
"Woah, hey, there's no need to get nasty," Pedro said as his eyes locked onto the tray of surgical implements. "I'm a civilian. I've got no reason not to spill the beans."
​
"Civilian," the mantis looking interrogator scoffed. "You killed at least forty of our soldiers, and crippled over a dozen more."
​
"I'm just a guy trying to defend his home. If your people had just obeyed the 'no trespassing' signs, nobody would have died," Pedro responded.
​
"In any case, it's your medical condition that's responsible for any nastiness," the interrogator informed the human captive. "The squad that dug you out from under that landslide thought they were recovering a corpse for autopsy. Growing replacement organs for your ruptured ones was straightforward enough, but your species is violently allergic to all of our existing bone glue formulations, so your broken bones are going to have to heal the slow way. I'm told that broken ribs are even more painful than a fractured thoracic plate."
​
"Convenient," Pedro said. "You get to dose me with enough painkillers to keep me from guarding my tongue and still claim you're just trying to help me."
​
"Quite convenient," the interrogator agreed. "Also a useful argument against those who claim that compassion is nothing but a waste of resources. May i have your full name for the next exchange of survival records?"
​
"Pedro Fook. I'm seriously tempted to give you the correct spelling instead of the one English speakers will pronounce correctly, but i'm too tired for that game."
​
The interrogator paused to listen to what the linguist was telling him through his earpiece and then clacked in amusement. "Very droll. I can accept that a civilian would have sufficient motive for attacking our troops, but i find your effectiveness implausible."
​
Pedro answered, "Why? Hunting the free-range livestock gets us kill training. Paintball games give us tactical training against opponents as smart and creative as we are. Wilderness hiking and camping gets us survival training. And VR lets us familiarize ourselves with the stuff that would be too dangerous to do for real."
​
"But how are you coordinating your attacks?" the interrogator asked.
​
"We aren't," Pedro answered. "We're spread out enough that we aren't likely to get in each other's ways; and we all grew up reading the same books, watching the same movies, and playing the same games, so we all have fairly similar ideas as to what tactics are likely to work in what situations. We don't need to win, we just have to keep harassing your people enough to prove we haven't abandoned our claim until the military gets here. If you had a prior claim, you should have planted a flag or left a beacon in orbit or something, so we'd have known we needed to negotiate instead of just moving in."
​
"Habitable planets are far to precious to be left in the hands of those who can't defend them," the interrogator replied. "There are a few interstellar species so xenophobic that they will glass a planet that someone else beat them to. If you can't keep us from taking it when we want to preserve it, you'd have no hope of keeping them from destroying it."
​
"You still could have tried negotiating first and attacking second," Pedro replied angrily. "Counter-gravity tech would be well worth sharing a planet over. Possibly even giving one up if we could have come to an arrangement regarding the people who have put down roots too deep to be willing to move to a different one. Too late for that now, though."
​
"You have no FTL," the interrogator said. "How would you leave, and how could you have come here from somewhere else."
​
"Why do you think we--ohhhhhh..." Pedro suddenly realized, "You never did solve the energy discharge from getting it almost right problem. You had counter-grav, you could just do your research and development in deep space where failures wouldn't destroy your planet. We had to focus on miniaturization instead, so the energy release was small enough to contain, until we could consistently get it right. Then we scaled back up until we had something suitable for a mass transit system. By the way, the emergency evacuation portals can be weaponized, so i'd advise against backing us into any corners. And our home planet isn't on this network, so even if you manage to capture a control unit intact, you can't get all of us!"
​
"Do you know where it is, in spatial terms?" the interrogator asked.
​
Pedro started to shrug and them stopped when his ribs objected. "Galaxy cluster on the other side of the Great Attractor from here, if i remember correctly. We've got at least a hundred planets scattered across a dozen different galaxies, as best the astronomers can tell. There's one that's suspected of not even being in the same universe."
​
"What does Ferrari translate as," the interrogator asked.
​
"Did anyone notice that paved track with the freestanding garage near my house?" Pedro responded. "That car in there, that's a Ferrari."
​
The translator listened to something on his earpiece and then said, "Four-wheeled ground vehicle, internal combustion engine--used for recreational racing?" Getting a nod from Pedro he went on, "The car is named after the planet?"
​
"No," Pedro answered. "The planet was named after the car; the car is named after the guy who founded the company that originally manufactured it. No clue what the etymology on his family name is."
​
"I see," the interrogator said. His insect-like anatomy and stridulatory vocal apparatus didn't prevent him from being noticeably disturbed by what he'd learned.
​
-------------------------------------
​
"But everyone calls their planet 'Dirt'," Admiral Crossack objected once he finished watching the recording of the interview.
​
"But they're not from here," Captain Hussend said. "It would have been obvious, except their method of getting here flies in the face of everything we know about FTL tech. We've got enough seismic surveys now to know those bunkers are nowhere near big enough to hold everyone who went into them. Not even with true stasis tech or physiology that would allow for adult cryofreeze. Can't swear on the former, but we know they don't have the latter."
​
"A pity this Pedro never studied enough physics to explain how their portals work. He can tell us what they do, but not why," Intelligence Officer Rouel said. "They probably sent anyone who did have that knowledge home in the first wave of evacuations. A pity we didn't know to stop them."
​
Captain Hussend disagreed. "Just as well we didn't. If that portal tech really does have the same energy discharge problem as conventional FTL, they have at least planetary, and possibly system scale, MAD. Firing on evacuees would have been a disaster."
​
"And Pedro thinks they've sent enough shuttle parts through that portal for them to reverse engineer the counter-gravity tech," Admiral Crossack said glumly. "Doesn't know enough to guess how long that will take, or which direction they'll try to hit us from once they have it. I suppose i can't really blame him for not bothering to study astrography with the way their portal network ignores physical distance, but it's blasted inconvenient for us."
​
"And President Chen still insists that negotiation is impossible until their military arrives in force--no one currently on planet has the authority or the firepower to force all factions to abide by any agreement," Rouel noted, equally glum. "We need to crack one of those bunkers open, see what's in there."
​
"Already in planning," Captain Hussend said. "And i just ordered it moved to the top of the priority list."
​
That was when the bunkers in question exploded. A number of blunt conical projectiles erupted from each site, propelled by an unholy mixture of chemical rockets and conter-grav.
​
"Those missiles have shields," one of the point defense sensor techs reported.
​
Captain Hussend's pupils went to full dilation and he lunged for the fleet wide communication toggle. "All personnel, stand by to repel boarders. Projectile loadout, not concussion."
​
Admiral Crossack stared at the captain in consternation. "That firefight is going to be a nightmare for damage control."
​
"If they can survive that kind of acceleration," Hussend waved a hand at the display that was tracking the missiles' progress, "and be able to fight afterwards, then while concussion injuries may still be a nightmare for the survivors' nearest and dearest to deal with, they won't do us any good."
​
"Notify me as soon as all of these presumed boarding missiles have either docked or been destroyed," Admiral Crossack told the sensor officer sorrowfully. Then he turned to the main console and began reciting a lengthy series of authorization codes, concluding with, "Assimilator boarding protocol to standby."
​
"You think they're that dangerous, sir?" one of the other ship commanders asked on a private channel.
​
"MAD only works if it truly is mutual," Admiral Crossack explained. "We don't know how many planets these humans have or where they are; we cannot allow them to have that information about ours. A species that scores as high as this one for both aggression and innovation is not something we want to have to fight a defensive war against."
​
Even with the deranged acceleration produced by the hybrid drive systems, it was several long minutes before the boarding missiles began impacting against the orbiting ships. The smaller, faster ships had been sent racing away from Ferrari. Half of them immediately headed to various WHN stations to relay the information acquired so far; half of them loitered on the fringes of the system to see how events played out. The larger ships, however, needed too much time to bring their main engines up to full thrust to escape the attack via distance.
​
The human soldiers from the last of the boarding missiles to arrive were greeted by an automated sounding, "Assimilation boarding protocol activated. Detection of any breaching charge will activate the self-destruct on all WHN ships within one astronomical unit."
​
"What did we do that spooked them that bad?" a human from a different boarding party wondered.
​
"If that translated correctly," the squads senior member answered, "they're using a protocol intended for somebody else. Still, we must have spooked them at least a little to go with one that all-or-nothing."
​
"I'm getting painted with a sensor laser," a third man reported. "Can they eavesdrop on us without cracking the radio encryption?"
​
Admiral Crossack figured it was time to offer his proposal. "If you refrain from penetrating any further into our ships, we will withdraw to the fringes of this system until we can negotiate terms for retrieving our planet-side personnel as well as your own return. We will also order our ground troops to return to and remain in the currently existing fortified positions for so long as there are no attacks on those positions. Is this cease fire acceptable?"
​
"You will refrain from attacking the positions we currently hold?" one of the human boarders asked.
​
"We will," Admiral Crossack answered.
​
"Terms accepted."
​
-----------------------------------
​
Negotiations went as well as could be expected when the humans were reluctant to allow enough Heromancy shuttles near the planet to lift all of their personnel at once and the WHN officers were reluctant to leave a contingent of the size they could lift at one time on the planet alone. The boarding parties, in contrast, had been returned as soon as the humans could satisfy themselves that the shuttle was not booby trapped--neither they nor the WHN was happy about the active self-destruct contingency.
​
Eventually a compromise was reached in which the last of the Heromancy bases on Ferrari was to be converted into an embassy. It wouldn't actually attain that status under Heromancy law until the Council of Winglords formally recognized at least one of the human governments, and required a Winglord's presence to attain at least consulate status--but nothing prevented the humans from granting it formal diplomatic recognition in the meanwhile.
​
President Chen and Admiral Crossack sat facing each other in one of the lounges of the future embassy. "Exactly how much authority do you have to negotiate?" President Chen asked.
​
"Officially, none," Crossack answered. "Treaties must be ratified by the council and negotiated by a Winglord. Unofficially, i should be able to give you reliable guidance as to what terms will be acceptable and what will not. How much of a courtship dance will be required to get those terms accepted, i can't guess until i know which Winglord will be conducting the official negotiations."
​
"Seems strange to give you the authority to start a war, but not to finish it," Chen observed.
​
"Ordinarily," Crossack explained, "a Winglord would have been dispatched as soon as we realized the situation was anomalous. However, they happen to be in the middle of the once a decade Grand Conclave, the one time when Winglords whose disputes cannot be reconciled by legal means are permitted to seek normally illegal forms of redress. Any Winglord not participating still wants to be there to keep an eye on those who are."
​
"Normally illegal...such as dueling?" Chen guessed.
​
"Precisely. I was able to attend the last Conclave, and the preparation rituals, intended to preclude cheating, are so humiliating that it can be safely assumed that the participants were not going to be satisfied by anything less than blood." Crossack added, "Technically it's not limited to Winglords, but the requirements for ordinary citizens to challenge anyone are much more stringent. The conventional wisdom is that the less one has to lose, the less likely one is to be deterred by death and dishonor."
​
"Hmm, i suppose i can see the logic in that." A communication device pinged, and President Chen looked at the display. "What is a Voice, among your people?"
​
Admiral Crossack's ear tufts straightened. Finally, for good or for ill, he would know what was to be. "Both a courier and a seal of authentication. They make no decisions, but they speak with the authority of the full Council of Winglords. They are generally superlative specimens of species that have powers of persuasion or coercion, which is another reason they are so rigorously trained to be bearers of law only and never lawgivers."
​
"I see," Chen said slowly. "If she's coming with an arrest warrant, like you were speculating about a few days ago, we're willing to offer you asylum."
​
"I find exile more unpalatable than death and dishonor combined, but i am honored by your willingness to have me," Admiral Crossack said. "I am a bit puzzled by it, however. I was the one who ordered the attack on your world, after all."
​
President Chen shrugged. "You only fought with those who wanted to fight, and the conter-grav tech we captured is more than adequate compensation for the infrastructure damage. And the special ops teams that boarded your ships were flattered by the fact that you felt you had to pull out your worst case scenario contingency to stop them. The penultimate contingency apparently wasn't good enough. Er, i hope that was your worst case contingency."
​
"Worst case for contingency triggers," Crossack agreed. "There's self-destruct every ship in the system now, and trigger a system sterilizing solar flare, but those are direct triggers, and the latter is for scenarios that so far remain purely hypothetical. And the problem was that your people only needed to capture one ship, while i had to keep every single one out of their hands."
​
"Your people haven't figured out that the counter to a gray goo scenario is to build nannites that eat nannites?" Chen asked rhetorically. "What are the Assimilators, anyway?"
​
"The reason we don't do implanted technology unless there's no viable alternative medically and keep augmented reality to the absolute minimum needed for non-lethal training," Crossack said. "As best anyone has been able to tell, the Assimilators started as a faction in a VR role playing game. Somewhere along the line the species that originally created the game switched from external device full immersion VR to cyborg tech augmented reality and the players started LARPing. Sometime after that, they stopped their practice of only cyborg modding volunteers who wanted to join their club and started modding anyone they could catch."
​
Crossack grimaced and continued, "As long as they needed a full surgical suite to perform the modifications, they were strictly a law enforcement problem. Unfortunately, before the last of them could be hunted down, they got their hands on some kind of replicant nano-tech that lets them infiltrate a neural link into a person without that person's knowledge."
​
"There's no such thing as a person with a direct brain-computer interface who isn't one of these Assimilators," Chen asked for clarification.
​
"No," Crossack sighed. "Any network they manage to link into, any person directly connected to that network immediately gets converted. How they do it, we're not sure; the leading hypothesis is that they've managed to create a computer-based intelligence with persuasive or coercive powers of a type and power that require a person to either take the Voice's Oath or else accept lifetime quarantine. But we just don't know. The good news is that as long as you keep your tech at arms length, it's perfectly safe, or at least they can't do anything that a conventional hacker couldn't. But it does mean that we can't infiltrate their network to figure out what in the seven blue perditions is going on with them. There are some aspects of a neural link that an external interface just can't mimic."
​
"That could be a problem," President Chen said. "Thankfully, we can't run cable through a portal--it gets cut anytime there's a power blip--but we've got way too many people with medical implants. Your people don't happen to know how to repair spinal cord injuries, do they?"
​
"Some species yes, others no," Crossack answered. "In our efforts to provide medical care to POWs of your species, we found that the treatment had to be provided immediately to be effective, and that which treatment protocol would work varied by both the cause of the damage and idiosyncratic factors. We had to guess right on the first try for treatment to work."
​
"Figures," Chen said. "Any vaccine for their nannite infiltrators?"
​
"A vaccine...for nannites?" Crossack asked in surprise.
​
"Why not?" Chen asked. "Any sufficiently advanced nano-tech is indistinguishable from biology; so why not borrow a page from the bio-control handbook?"
​
"I don't believe there's any such thing," Crossack answered slowly. "Many species can induce sufficient sensitivity to trigger a lethal allergic reaction, but that means walking around with a lethal allergy to many common structural and medical materials."
​
"That would be problematic," Chen agreed. "I need to pass this information about the Assimilators along as quickly as possible. Excuse me for a few minutes."
​
"Of course," Admiral Crossack said. Once President Chen had left the room he stood and began pacing. Curiously, knowing that a Voice was en route and that he would not have to wait much longer to have his hopes and fears regarding his future resolved was making the delay harder rather than easier to endure. After a few laps of failed attempts to resign himself to further waiting, he went to the door and asked the officer guarding it to find out how soon the Voice was expected to arrive.
​
"The Voice's shuttle has landed and the humans are trying to figure out what size and type of escort is appropriate to her rank," the officer reported. Then he blinked and flicked his tail in confusion. "Sir, a Voice is her own escort, isn't she?"
​
"The humans don't know that. A Voice speaks with the authority of the full Council of Winglords, but the humans have no official relationship to the Wingover Hegemony until the Voice delivers her words--assuming she has been given words to that effect."
​
"Precisely, Winglord Crossack."
​
Crossack turned to face the new arrival. The female was tall and so ethereally slender that she was nearly translucent. "Voice Laurelliana," Admiral Winglord Crossack said, having met this particular Voice before. He started to bow, but then the implications of her greeting caught up to him and his ear tufts straightened so hard they nearly snapped. "Wait, what--?"
​
"For recognizing that the impossible was possible in time to avert disaster, for valuing the welfare of the Heromancy above your own pride, for a lifetime of exemplary service, you have been granted the title of Winglord and a seat on the counsel."
​
Admiral Winglord Crossack needed some time to reply as he first had to persuade his throat to stop trying to swallow itself. At last he said, "I am well aware of how badly things could have gone if i had been any slower to admit that the humans must have some other, unknown means of bridging the distance between worlds--but i would have thought that barely enough to buy me an honorable retirement, given that i lost a war i chose to initiate. Then too, i would never have arrived at that understanding so quickly without Captain Hessend and Intelligence Officer Rouel, and their many subordinates who had the wisdom to recognize which reports required immediate attention."
​
"You followed standard procedure to the letter until it was made clear that you were not dealing with the kind of situation which that procedure was intended to cover. You therefore cannot be faulted for initiating the conflict. You were also able to admit that the inconceivable had occurred. To not only be able to stretch your thinking to accommodate what was previously unknown and unimagined, but to do so in time to keep defeat from becoming disaster--this is a capacity much needed in a Winglord, and rarest to find. Many prepare for the impossible; but how can anyone prepare for what he cannot imagine?"
​
Crossack nodded, conceding the point, and the Voice continued, "Many admirals find it almost physically painful to yield overall command to the captain of their ground forces and be relegated to providing fire support. Many of those who have no difficulty yielding command are reluctant to reclaim it when the priority returns to space-side operations, preferring to avoid responsibility. But you have never shown any hesitation in either direction, preferring to let the responsibility rest where it can best be fulfilled."
​
Crossacck shifted and flicked an ear tuft and said, "It helps that i trust Captain Hessend's judgement."
​
"And you never once have tried to claim the credit for your subordinate's efforts," Voice Laurelliana smiled at Crossack.
​
"Eh, stolen honor is not," Crossack replied.
​
"Many say it," the Voice said. "Few live it. The appropriate commendations for those you cited credited with identifying the anomalies here have already been issued. The Vaerins claim to have solved the regeneration resistance problem in draeliks; if Hero Hessend chooses to risk the as yet inadequately tested treatment, the Council will cover his expenses."
​
Hero fits a lot better on him than Winglord sits on me, Crossack thought. "I can't predict whether Hero Hessend will take that offer. He keeps his own counsel when it comes to his injuries."
​
"Is something wrong?" Voice Laurelliana asked President Chen, who'd returned partway through her conversation with Crossack and had been staring at her ever since.
​
"You look much like the description of some of our more insidious legends," Chen told her bluntly. "As unlikely as it is to be anything other than coincidence, it is still difficult to keep the resemblance from inducing significant levels of paranoia."
​
"At least you prefer to lance the boil at once rather than dance around the issue while it festers ever deeper," Laurelliana said, dropping her gaze to indicate that she was speaking as herself and not as a Voice. "Long and long ago, or so it is said, while we were still planet-bound, mine and certain of the other will-bending species dealt with those who abused their powers by exiling them to another world. Your portal network suggests that this is not so impossible as we had thought. If your species has suffered from predation by one of our outcasts, i wouldn't blame you for being paranoid where my kind is concerned."
​
"The conspiracy nuts are going to have fun when they hear that," Chen said with a sigh.
​
Voice Laurelliana lifted her head again. "The council wishes to extend formal diplomatic recognition to your people, but we are suffering from some confusion as to which entity we should be extending that recognition to. Some clarification as to your political structure is needed."
​
"Ah," President Chen said. "I can see how it might. Each of the factions on this planet is considered a sovereign nation, although they're a bit more easy-going about their borders than was, or for that matter still is, customary back on earth. The Faction Arbitration Council is precisely what the name says, a neutral forum in which the factions can hash out their differences and save face by accepting a compromise suggested by a neutral party instead of their opponent. We have no real authority, but we do provide a place where you can address all of the factions at once."
​
"It sounds as though you have all of the responsibility of a Winglord, and none of the power," Voice Laurelliana said.
​
Chen shrugged. "I may only have the authority of a debate moderator, but most of the time that's all i need. As for the times when it is not sufficient, well, the prospect of imminent destruction tends to have a remarkably clarifying effect on everyone's priorities."
​
"I suppose it would," the Voice said. "Whose military did you call in?"
​
"The Liberation Hegemony doesn't claim sovereignty over any but it's native States, but they do provide military protection and economic assistance to anyone who abides by what they regard as the minimum standard of human rights. Which usually works out in practice to 'you can have whatever laws you want as long as you make it easy for people who don't like your laws to leave'. Which is why you never see a planet on the Hegemony network with fewer than seven factions--easy to leave requires that there be a compatible place for you to go."
​
"So we can treat with your Faction Arbitration Counsel as a planetary power, and this Liberation Hegemony as a regional one?" Voice Laurelliana asked, and then added "--to the extent that that's a coherent concept with the way your portal network allegedly ignores distance."
​
"Yes," President Chen said. "There's also the Golden Bureaucracy Bloc. Don't buy anything from them without reading the fine print, and never take out a loan from them. The only reason they aren't ruling us all is that the Hegemony is perfectly willing to apply Alexander's solution to Gordian red tape."
​
"Cultural reference," the Voice said. "Not clear from context."
​
"Sorry," President Chen replied. "Gordias was some guy who tied a really complicated knot and said that the man who untied it would rule the world. Alexander came by a while later, looked it over, and used his sword to cut it apart. After he went on to conquer a larger chunk of the world in less time than anyone before him, the locals where Grodias left the knot decided that this counted as 'untying' it."
​
"So keep it simple, and in good faith, when dealing with the Hegemony, because you never know what they might decide is underhanded enough to void the contract?" Crossack guessed.
​
"This system of yours...works?" the Voice asked uncertainly.
​
"As well as anything else we've tried," Chen answered. "Mostly due to the fact that most of us have gotten too lazy to want to bother proving that we could run other people's lives better than they can. MAD helps keep the peace, too, of course. Although, the fact that exile is always an option does tend to leave people favoring lethal forms of self-defense."
​
"Now that would explain a lot," Winglord Crossack said. "I should go mention that detail to Hero Hessend--he's a bit sore over the fact that it was your civilians bleeding his men so hard."

Hello all! I'm writing this post on behalf of my fiancé, who is currently in the hospital due to his severe, persistent cough that he has had for nearly 6 weeks now. Some specs on him; he is 34 (going to be 35), ~230 pounds, 5' 11"; not a smoker, pretty active (he used to run anywhere from 3-10 miles a day), doesn't have/never had asthma, and is currently employed at a warehouse that packs/ships a variety of things, everything from adhesives to aerosols.
Back in mid-November, my fiancé noticed that he had a cough and was feeling a little "off". It was a weekend and prior to going in to work on Monday, he called ahead to his supervisor, notifying him that he had a cough; given all the COVID precautions in place, his supervisor suggested that he go to a walk-in clinic to get tested for COVID. So, my fiancé did so; he got a COVID test and the result was negative. However, the doctor thought that his cough sounded a bit more like bronchitis and gave him a course of antibiotics (azithromycin) plus steroids (prednisone). They also took a chest x-ray at the time, but it came back clear (no indication of any infection or fluid in the lungs). After that doctor visit, my fiancé completely finished both courses of antibiotics and steroids, felt OK for a few days, but the cough came back.
His cough was (and had been) non-productive and felt and seemed higher up in his chest. He continued like this for a few days until he went back to the doctor, again; because the antibiotics did not seem to have worked, they figured it was viral and instead prescribed another round of steroids. The cough seemed to get worse and at times, it was slightly productive (he would sometimes cough up yellow or clear or green phlegm, but often nothing at all). He also started to get these severe coughing attacks and would cough so hard that he would gag and sometimes vomit. But, over these last 6 weeks, he's never had any other symptoms beyond the coughing; no fever, no stuffy nose, no congestion, nothing. Then, during his second round of steroids, about 3 days in, he had a very bad reaction to the steroids; he went completely pale, felt cool and clammy, could not breathe well, was wheezing, and his arms and legs began to go numb. Our doctor told us to go to the ER immediately and we did. They took his vitals, they took a blood sample, and ran another COVID test; he was completely normal, bloodwork was all normal (no elevated white blood cell count), and negative for his COVID test. They took another chest x-ray but it also came back clear. They checked his breathing (as they had in previous visits) but his lungs sounded completely clear. In time, at the ER, he was able to breathe better and they also administered an anti-anxiety medication which helped. After that, we went back home, but his cough wasn't going away, and wasn't getting any better.
After about another week, we went back to my fiancé's primary physician, again, and he prescribed, again, a round of azithromycin and prednisone. My fiancé finished both courses of those last week, but with no sign of improvement. Over the weekend, too, my fiancé had an especially bad fit of coughing and suddenly had a splitting headache; he was coughing so hard and all of sudden, he said that it "felt like part of his brain exploded." He developed a really bad migraine and was in the bed for a couple days; since then, he has had headaches on and off (my worry is some kind of a secondary coughing headache). So, we contacted my fiancé's physician again and he suggested that my fiancé get a CT scan and more bloodwork and visit with a pulmonary specialist; we got the CT scan and went to the specialist. The CT scan came back completely clean as well as his bloodwork. Everything was 100% normal, except for my fiancé's cough. It is persistent and severe; he can hardly speak a full sentence before coughing again and regularly gets bad coughing attacks. At this point, the pulmonologist strongly suggested that my fiancé be admitted to the hospital for more testing and intensive treatment in a controlled setting (just in case he had a bad reaction to anything).
Now, we're into the second day of my fiancé being in the hospital. Day 1, they gave him another course of azithromycin and a steroid (I can't recall the name, but it was not prednisone). They did a chest x-ray (came back clear), more bloodwork (came back completely normal), and a COVID test (negative). He did not improve at all in terms of his cough (even with codeine--it seems to have no effect at all on his cough); it's a persistent, nagging, kind of hacking cough, that's sometimes productive, sometimes not. On Day 1, my fiancé also had blood drawn for a pertussis test (I had been wondering if it might be whooping cough and I was relieved that they were finally testing for it). Now, on to Day 2; my fiancé is now on a different course of antibiotics and a stronger steroid (I'm forgetting both names--I'll double check). He's injected with this steroid once every 8 hours. They also did a respiratory panel today and took a sample/swab similar to the COVID test (i.e., nasopharyngeal swab from way up the nose); those results came back totally clear, no microbes detected (so, our doctor told us that pertussis is not the cause of my fiancé's coughing--I remain skeptical). And that's where we're at right now. Still, my fiancé isn't showing any signs of improvement, even after the new course of antibiotics and steroids today. NOTE: The only time that he DOES NOT cough is when he is sleeping. Once he's asleep, out is out like a light and he isn't disturbed in his sleep by coughing attacks.
So, any thoughts or suggestions? I'm totally at a loss. The only thing I can think of is perhaps some kind of environmental contaminant or exposure to something. My fiancé, as I mentioned, does work in a warehouse (although, he's been excused from work for the last 6 weeks since he started coughing). Mainly, he packs pallets and moves them around with a forklift. On occasion, he sometimes has to pack pallets with boxes from a hazardous materials room or an aerosols room; but, those materials are always sealed and packed carefully. I just wonder if he was maybe exposed to some kind of an aerosol or some other substance or dust or residue... But, the symptoms don't completely line-up. My fiancé has severe coughing, and although coughing is a symptom associated with being exposed to some kind of a substance in a workplace, it is typically a part of other symptoms with occupational asthma. My fiancé doesn't have any asthma symptoms; he can breathe fine, but the coughing can cause him to have trouble breathing when he has a coughing attack. My fiancé has two different inhalers that he was prescribed when the coughing started (a typical albuterol inhaler--which doesn't help him at all--and a symbicort inhaler--which provides very mild and temporary relief, if any). I was thinking it was pertussis at first; my fiancé last had a Tdap shot in 2013 or 2014 (he couldn't remember for sure) and although it is relatively recent, that vaccination does lose some potency over time. Although the respiratory panel that my fiancé had yesterday came back negative, I wonder what the blood test for pertussis will come back as. Anyway, I have no idea what is going on with my fiancé and the doctors seem equally confused and at a loss. Steroids, antibiotics--nothing is having any kind of effect or relief and I'm getting a little desperate for answers. I appreciate any help! Thank you!

by Ethan A. Huff staff writer September 19, 2013 from NaturalNews Website
​
Widespread consumer demand for plastic products that are free of the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) has led to some significant positive changes in the way that food, beverage and water containers are manufactured.
But a new study out of Germany has found that thousands of other potentially harmful chemicals are still leeching from plastic products into food and beverages, including an endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC) known as di(2-ethylhexyl) fumarate, or DEHF, that is completely unregulated.
Martin Wagner and his colleague, Jorg Oehlmann, from the Goethe University Frankfurt, in conjunction with a team of researchers from the German Federal Institute of Hydrology, learned this after conducting tests on 18 different bottled water products to look for the presence of EDCs.
Using an advanced combination of bioassay work and high-resolution mass spectrometry, the team identified some 24,520 different chemicals present in the tested water.
But of major concern, and the apparent underpinning of the study's findings, was DEHF, a plasticizer chemical that is used to make plastic bottles more flexible.
According to reports, DEHF was clearly identified in the tested water as the most consistent and obvious culprit causing anti-estrogenic activity.
Despite trace amounts of more than 24,000 other potentially damaging chemicals, DEHF stood out as the only possible EDC capable of inducing this particular observed activity, a highly concerning observation.
The study's published abstract explains that 13 of the 18 bottled water products tested exhibited "significant" anti-estrogenic activity, while 16 of the 18 samples were found to inhibit the body's androgen receptors by an astounding 90 percent.
Additionally, the other 24,520 chemical traces besides DEHF were also identified as exhibiting antagonistic activity, which means that they, too, are detrimental to the body's hormonal system.
Many thousands of endocrine-disrupting chemicals
...used in plastic production prove material unsafe
But DEHF is apparently not alone in causing significant damage to the endocrine system, as the team was unable to identify this chemical as being specifically anti-androgenic.
What this suggests is that there is some other chemical, or chemical combination, being leeched into bottled water that is interfering with the body's chemical signaling system, which is, of course, responsible for hormone production and use within the body.

"We confirmed the identity and biological activity of DEHF and additional isomers of dioctyl fumarate and maleate using authentic standards," report the researchers.

"Since DEHF is anti-estrogenic but not anti-androgenic we conclude that additional, yet unidentified EDCs must contribute to the antagonistic effect of bottled water."
So while these specific findings concerning DEHF are groundbreaking, the overall conclusion to be drawn from this research is that far more study is needed to determine the types of chemicals that are being leeched from plastic into our food and water, not to mention the extent of this leeching.
And since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the rest of the three-letter government agencies will surely never get around to conducting this important research, independent science will simply have to take up the charge.

"This work is a 'tour de force' in identification of endocrine disruptors in packaged materials," says Bruce Blumberg from the University of California, Irvine, as quoted by Chemistry World.

This type of analysis, he adds,

"will be very important for our future understanding of what chemicals we are routinely exposed to and which of these pose hazards of being endocrine disruptors."

You can read the full study in "Identification of Putative Steroid Receptor Antagonists in Bottled Water - Combining Bioassays and High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry".
In the meantime, conscious consumers can avoid plastic containers whenever possible and simply use glass or steel containers instead to avoid these unknown risks.
Sources

rsc.org - Worrying molecule found in bottled water medicalnewstoday.com - Hormone-disrupting chemical detected in bottled water

I have come across a few different phenomena involving the appearance of "translucent" blobs that are thought to be organic matter. They always seem to be related to weather or tidal events, or found in the ocean. I'm hoping to do some more research on some similar cases and look at past posts (I searched the sub but can't find a recent one). Basically, it's always claimed to be biological - organic matter - that is translucent. Usually it's clear sometimes it is reported as more glowing or with a specific hue (cool colors - blue, purple). Sometimes called star jelly.

1. Strange Rains in Oakville On August 7, 1994, the small town of Oakville, WA was hit by a torrential rainstorm. The downpours occurred within 20 square miles and weren't made of rainwater, but gelatinous blobs. It's reported that anyone who came into contact with these blobs developed flu-like symptoms. The symptoms were written off as coincidental by doctors in the area. The blob rain occurred 6 times over 3 weeks.

Samples of the blobs were sent to a private research lab which determined they were made of eukaryotic cells, which are basic cells containing a nucleus that are found in many types of animals. Another lab identified them as human white blood cells, and the Washington State Department of Ecology's hazardous material spill response unit found that the cells had no nuclei.
Theories include the blobs being pieces of jellyfish - supposedly a result of bombing runs done by the Air Force in the pacific ocean, which could have hit jellyfish, causing the debris to be mixed in with a passing raincloud. The US Air Force confirmed bombing runs at these times but denied knowledge about the substance.
Another theory posits that the blobs came from the break up of waste from airplanes. Commercial airlines deny this as waste is dyed blue and all of these blobs were clear.
It is further reported that the illnesses continued for 6 weeks in the population, and that many outdoor animals became ill and died or disappeared during this time frame as well.
Due to the proximity to the Air Force base some believe it may have been a misfire or intentional test of a biological weapon. Obviously, this is denied by the Air Force and local officials.
All evidence evaporated, no samples were kept, and the Washington State Department of Ecology shows no records for submission of the blob sample. So, other than eye witness accounts and the passing-on of the story, there is no evidence this blob storm occurred.
NY Times Medium Unsolved

1. The Basis for The Blob? In Pennsylvania, in 1950, two police officers watch as a mysterious object falls from the sky. They report it as a glittering mass drifting down from the sky and landing in a nearby field. It glows on it's own and has a purplish hue, and glitters when they shine their lights on it. The jelly-like object was six feet in diameter and about a foot thick. The two officers call for back up, and when two more show up they also witness the strange mass. Upon grasping at the object one officer found it came apart, sticking to his skin and evaporating. After 30 minutes, the blob evaporated entirely. The officers filed a report but no other such phenomenon has occurred. All 4 officers firmly believed it was a "living" object. Several years later Jack H. Harris remembered an article on this event and used it as his inspiration for his 1958 film The Blob.

IMDB 13th floor Gizmodo
There are stories of huge colonies of organisms making up "blobs" at sea, beaches full of jelly like creatures, collections of slime that travel the ocean, and weird unknown translucent organisms.
Please suggest any similar unexplained phenomena! I'm especially interested in a story about a retired Naval officer who encountered something diving or on a submarine, which I can't seem to find anywhere.
Edit: fixed amp link