Author: VD

Reforestation

The greening of Europe and the consequences thereof.

Within the last 100 years, Europe has experienced two World Wars, the end of communism, the emergence of the European Union and a series of other transformative political and economic developments. A team of scientists has now been able to visualize the impact of historical events in maps that show the growth and decline of settlements, forests and croplands.

The map, shown above, is the result of a research project led by Dutch scholar Richard Fuchs from the University of Wageningen. Besides regional political and economic trends, Europe’s landscape was shaped by several larger developments of the 20th century, according to Fuchs.

“More than 100 years ago, timber was used for almost everything: as fuel wood, for metal production, furniture, house construction. Hence, at around 1900 there was hardly any forest areas left in Europe. Especially after World War II, many countries started massive afforestation programs which are still running today,” Fuchs told The Washington Post.

As a result, Europe’s forests grew by a third over the last 100 years. At the same time, cropland decreased due to technological innovations such as motorization, better drainage and irrigation systems: Relatively fewer area was needed to produce the same amount of food. Furthermore, many people migrated from rural to urban areas, or overseas.

Fuchs’ fascinating conclusion: Forests and settlements grew at the same time and Europe is a much greener continent today than it was 100 years ago. A closer look at different regions and countries reveals Europe’s recovery from the deforestation of past centuries.

Now, I’m absolutely all for more trees and greener continents, but correct me if I’m wrong here. Since plants give off carbon dioxide, wouldn’t more trees tend to explain more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Yes, I know plants take in more than they give off, while they are alive, but then they release it all again when they die.

During their lifetimes, plants generally give off about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2), that they absorb, although this varies a great deal between different kinds of plants. Once they die, almost all of the carbon that they stored up in their bodies is released again into the atmosphere. 


I don’t believe global warming is good science, given its complete failure as a predictive model, but if we were to assume for the sake of argument that global warming exists and if it is the result of the greenhouse effect, wouldn’t greener continents be one of the obvious factors, however minor? Or does logging in the Amazon and Asia counterbalance more trees in Europe and North America?

Paul Ryan goes full-NeverTrump

It will be glorious when the Trumpslide upsets the applecarts of the GOP sellouts:

Speaker Paul Ryan told House Republicans on a conference call Monday morning that he’s done defending Donald Trump and will focus on maintaining his party’s increasingly imperiled House majority, according to sources on the call.The message amounted to a concession by the highest-ranking elected Republican that his nominee for president can’t win — and lawmakers should act accordingly to save themselves and preserve a Republican Congress to act as a check on Hillary Clinton.

I always told you they were the stupid faction of the bifactional Ruling Party. Now you know. Now everyone knows.

Project Big Fork: Infogalactic

INFOGALACTIC: an online encyclopedia without bias or thought police

Zürich, Switzerland. All around the world, thousands of users are accessing and editing the new online encyclopedia for the 21st Century, Infogalactic, which styles itself the Planetary Knowledge Core™. Conceived as a next-generation replacement for Wikipedia, the troubled online encyclopedia, Infogalactic is a dynamic fork of Wikipedia that is designed to supplant its predecessor by addressing the problems of bias, vandalism, harassment, abuse, and inaccuracy that have plagued the Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship project for years.

“Every notable public figure who has a page devoted to them knows very well what an inaccurate nightmare Wikipedia is,” said Vox Day, Lead Designer of Infogalactic, a computer game designer and bestselling philosopher. “The page about me there has had everything from my place of birth to the number of times I’ve been married wrong. And that’s not even counting the outright abuse, such as when Wikipedians replaced the entire page with a definition of a sexually-transmitted disease or with a string of obscenities.”

Infogalactic plans to solve the structural problems of a community-edited online encyclopedia through objectivity, proven game design principles, and a sophisticated series of algorithms. Currently in an operational Phase One, the Planetary Knowledge Core has a five-phase Roadmap that its founders claim will eliminate edit warring, significantly improve accuracy, neutralize vandalism and other forms of griefing, and render all forms of political bias on the part of administrators and editors irrelevant.

“The primary challenge facing any online wiki is the individual editor’s incentive to impose his perspective on everyone else,” said Renegade, the Operations Director of Infogalactic, who, as per the organization’s pro-anonymity policy, is known only by his handle. “Most people who contribute to an online knowledge base do so because they want to have their say, but in the end there can be only one perspective that is enforced by the site’s administrators. Infogalactic has solved that problem by embracing true objectivity and eliminating the enforcement incentive by moving from a centralized, vertically-stacked orientation to a decentralized, horizontally-distributed model.”

Infogalactic’s anti-bias architecture will permit users to select their preferred perspective and automatically see the version of the subject page that is closest to it based on a series of algorithms utilizing three variables, Relativity, Reliability, and Notability. This means a supporter of Hillary Clinton will see a different version of the current Donald Trump page than a Donald Trump supporter will, as both users will see the version of the page that was most recently edited by editors with perspective ratings similar to his own.

Read the rest of the press release at Infogalactic.



Thanks to the 172 Original Galaxians who made this possible. Special thanks to Rifleman and Renegade, who have both put in an incredible amount of time and effort. Thanks to Crew and Veritas, who did not hesitate to throw down and take responsibility for two vital areas moving forward. Thanks to Robert, the first Techstar, who provided invaluable advice. Thanks to the scores of early supporters, who have demonstrated that this is going to be a viable community effort.



And as for everyone else, now you know. Get on board, spread the word, and take back the cultural high ground of social media!

GOP Sabotage

In case it wasn’t clear from all the anti-Trump commentary by establishment Republicans over the last week, Mike Cernovich reports that elements inside the Republican Party are engaging in an active anti-Trump sabotage campaign:

Donald Trump’s get out the vote efforts have been sabotaged at every level by the GOP, sources report exclusively to this reporter. Some of the sabotage is obvious and clear, and others is more subtle. Their motivations for sabotage vary from personal and professional jealousy to financial.

The bait-and-switch.

When a Donald Trump volunteer goes to the local GOP office to get out the vote, she’ll be sent out to knock on doors for down ballot candidates in neighborhoods Trump has already won. Would-be volunteers have reported to me that when the showed up at the GOP office, the local office would tell them to campaign for other GOP candidates. When the volunteers told the local office that they wanted to campaign for Trump, they were told to leave.

Other would-be volunteers have told me they’d show up to GOP offices only to find the doors had been locked. Their calls would go unreturned. It was simply impossible to volunteer to get out the vote for Donald Trump.

It’s fascinating. I have suspected since the Clinton-Bush campaign that the Republican Party would sometimes rather lose than win, but there is no longer any shadow of a doubt that they are determined to take a fall for Hillary Clinton, just as John McCain did for Obama in 2008.

Can you imagine how well Trump would be doing if he wasn’t fighting a) his opponent, b) both mainstream and conservative medias, and c) his own party’s establishment?

“You’ll be in jail”

And that’s why his idiot handlers should just stay out of the way and let Trump be Trump:

Clinton established herself as a superior bureaucrat Sunday night with more mature knowledge of foreign policy minutiae and a more intelligible way of communicating details about how laws are made. But Trump won on points in what has become the Year of the Outsider, playing to a national television audience that polls show are weary of Washington’s same-old same-old and eager for new blood.

He had Clinton playing defense for most of the 90-minute clash, saying she would be ‘in jail’ if he ran the Justice Department – a reference to her classified email scandal – and declaring that she had ‘tremendous hate in her heart’ when she branded ‘half’ his supporters as ‘deplorables.’

He even bested her on her recollection of her own tenure at the helm of the U.S. State Department.
Trump recalled that Clinton was secretary of state when President Barack Obama drew his now-infamous rhetorical ‘red line’ in Syria, ineffectively warning Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons against insurgents and civilians.

Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton’s term ended.

As Milo put it on Gab: “Daddy is killing it”. If this builds momentum that Trump can carry through to the third debate, we’re going to see the Trumpslide.

Remember, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Trump doesn’t constantly push. He relaxes, coasts, and then pushes strongly again. There is nearly one month to go. He’s running against a criminal and he’s already ahead in some national polls. The final push hasn’t even begun.

Frank Lutz Focus Group: Who are you willing to vote for?

BEFORE #DEBATE
• Hillary: 8
• Trump: 9

AFTER DEBATE
• Hillary: 4
• Trump: 18

NFL Week 5

And the Vikings shoot to make it five straight against Houston. This is the weekly NFL open thread.

Okay, now this is going to sound crazy, but rest assured, it has NOTHING to do with my being a Vikings fan. A friend who shall go unnamed subscribes to the scripted theory of the NFL, by which he means that the probable outcome of the season is more or less determined in advance.

It doesn’t always hold up, of course, due to the unpredictable elements of the game, but he points out that there are observable primary, secondary, and tertiary narratives. And here’s where it gets interesting: for the first time, I’m picking up a narrative that suggests the Vikings are scripted to win the Super Bowl this year.

One example, and far from the most egregious:

The play of their defense has been the biggest on-field factor in their success, which should sound like a familiar formula to those with memories long enough to remember how the Broncos fueled their run to the Super Bowl last season. One member of that Broncos team is now in Minnesota and running back Ronnie Hillman has found more links the two clubs than a standout defense.


“The big thing is the camaraderie,” Hillman said, via the Pioneer Press. “This team plays for each other, and that’s the biggest part. This team has the same brotherhood — these guys treat each other like family the exact same [as in Denver], and that’s what you need to have a championship team. I saw it here right away, how these guys treat each other with respect and without excuses — they’re accountable for what they do, and that’s definitely a good trait to have as a whole. The guys are cool.”


There’s a lot of time between Week Five and the Super Bowl for those comparisons to grow stronger or prove to be superficial, but the Vikings have already shown an ability to overcome adverse developments that they’ll need to go the distance.


I picked up on this after watching their Week Two win and hearing the announcers go on and on about a very different game than the one I’d just watched.

Wait, they’re going to police US?

The lesser SJWs of SF fandom belatedly discover that SF’s thought police don’t only intend to police the speech, thoughts, and behavior of science fiction’s right wing:

The illiberal factions in fandom just want power. They don’t care much whom they go after, as long as they can flex their muscles. The Worldcon 75 committee has offered the latest sample of this, shoving Dave Weingart out as the filk head.

Dave discussed what happened here. In brief: Someone got the notion that Dave should never talk to her. He respected this. One day he inadvertently posted a Babylon 5 video link to a chat group which this other person was also in. For this, he was told he could continue to run filk only if he agreed to end all staff contact outside his division. Of course, it’s impossible to run a part of the program that way, so his only choice was to withdraw.

The concom’s action makes no sense of any kind. It grows out of the notion that “feeling offended” trumps every other consideration and entitles someone to claim any remedy. Well, listen, Helsinki gang. I’m offended. I hope every filker who was planning to go cancels out on you.

I once got a supporting membership. Some early suspicions that people of this kind were running the con led me to back out on it. I never had any real plans to go there, so there’s only one thing I can stop doing. I run a Twitter account called Filk News, which contains various tidbits about what’s happening in the filk world. From here on, I’m giving the Helsinki con no publicity there.

I know Dave personally. He’s a friend and a hard worker with a lot of integrity. Filkers know that. Maybe the Helsinki clique decided filk is beneath their idea of a con. They forget that filkers aren’t just filkers; we include pro writers, regular supporters of conventions, and other people who’ve helped to build and maintain fandom. If the con had just decided to drop filk — well, it can do that. But using bullying tactics to drive us away was a serious mistake.

And the Dark Lord laughed. It’s more than a little amusing to see how these hapless idiots obviously didn’t see it coming despite the fact that the same pattern has played out ever since the Montagnards turned on the Girondins. So, it should come as no surprise that the freakiest SJW, such as Mr. Alexandra Erin, publicly applaud the thought police, despite their hilarious incompetence.

I think no one would dispute to Mr. Weingart’s contributions to cons actually have been tremendously valuable. But as fannish circles and conventions embrace community standards and commitments to safety and work to be more welcoming to people from every walk of life, we really have to internalize the lesson that nobody is irreplaceable….

Even if he’s 100% right that this is just bad optics, even granting he’s 100% right that the restrictions he’d have to agree to would prevent him from doing his job, we can’t agree to treat women’s (and others’) safety concerns seriously right up until the moment that it’s inconvenient. That’s not how it works.

Translation: Everyone who doesn’t submit to the latest version of the Narrative will be replaced. And once they scent blood, the zharks will swarm. And really, if the safety of the delicate flowers is paramount, wouldn’t it be best for everyone if they just canceled the convention and everyone stayed home, safely ensconced in their blankets and covered with a thin, comforting coating of stale Doritos dust?

I look forward to the first accusations being directed at the Finns running Worldcon 75 and charging them with being secret Castalia operatives seeking to destroy the Hugo Awards.

When white-knighting goes awry

Gammas never grasp that the crowd is always going to choose the Alpha male over them, no matter how adroitly they virtue-signal:

House Speaker Paul Ryan was shouted down by chants of “Trump” at his Fall Fest event Saturday in Wisconsin. Ryan, who kicked off the speech talking about the “elephant in the room,” said that Trump’s banter with Billy Bush before taping an Access Hollywood segment in 2005 was “a troubling situation.”

The chants for “Trump” start at about the 6:40 mark in the video below.

Ryan was joined onstage by Wisconsites Ron Johnson and Scott Walker after the “Trump” shouts began, at the end of Ryan’s speech. Some also shouted, “God bless Trump,” and “See ya, Paul! Jackass!”

Ryan’s miscalculation wasn’t quite as bad as Ted Cruz’s at the RNC, but it was still pretty impressive.

You don’t need to die

Paisley Park opened to the public:

The complex opens one week before a memorial tribute concert in St. Paul, which is adjacent to Minneapolis. The public opening of the studio complex is a milestone for music lovers and historians. The complex opened in 1987, and was a fully functional recording studio used by a number of artists during its peak in the 1990s, including the Stone Temple Pilots, REM and Madonna.

Among the various acts that recorded there was Psykosonik. We recorded and mixed Unlearn there, although I spent almost no time in the studio since my only meaningful input on that CD was lyrical. Dan and Paul were going in a mellower, more ambient direction, and both Mike and I were not interested in it. We both left the band at the same time, after the CD was recorded, but before it was released, to focus on computer games.

However, I thought that one song off Unlearn, “Need to Die”, would be of interest in light of yesterday’s post about the way in which the choice to confront one’s fears or run from them as a young man tends to play a significant role in an individual’s life. Keep in mind that the song was written 22 years before “The Broken Freaks of Fandom”.



Caught in the mist like a rain shower
Life’s got you between your eyes
And wishful thinking don’t make it go away
That’s no surprise, yeah
There’s no surprise
Of living a lie
There’s no surprise


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die


Been holding back on your inside
Looks like you hide it well
But laughing faces can’t cover all your pain,
That keeps you in Hell
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die