Author: VD

Obama openly aiding Muslim terrorists

This action is unlikely to help convince those who believe the man is still a secret Muslim that they are incorrect:

President Obama waived a provision of federal law designed to prevent
the supply of arms to terrorist groups to clear the way for the U.S. to
provide military assistance to “vetted” opposition groups fighting
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Some elements of the Syrian opposition are associated with radical
Islamic terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, which was responsible for
the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville,
Pa., in 2001. Assad’s regime is backed by Iran and Hezbollah.

The president, citing his authority under the Arms Export Control
Act, announced today that he would “waive the prohibitions in sections
40 and 40A of the AECA related to such a transaction.” Those two
sections prohibit sending weaponry to countries described in section
40(d): “The prohibitions contained in this section apply with respect to
a country if the Secretary of State determines that the government of
that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international
terrorism,” Congress stated in the Arms Control Export Act.

“For purposes of this subsection, such acts shall include all
activities that the Secretary determines willfully aid or abet the
international proliferation of nuclear explosive devices to individuals
or groups or willfully aid or abet an individual or groups in acquiring
unsafeguarded special nuclear material,” the law continues.

 “The law allows the president to waive those prohibitions if he
“determines that the transaction is essential to the national security
interests of the United States.”” Either Obama is lying and arming terrorists is not in the national security interests of the United States, or worse, those interests are in direct opposition to the national security interests of the American people.

Never again

In light of the recent calls for gun control in light of yesterday’s lethal shootings in yet another gun-free zone, I thought it was important to remember this particular fact of history:

The official phase of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish campaign was opened today with a law forbidding Jews to possess firearms or other weapons.

This law was the first of a series designed to effect a “permanent solution” of the Jewish problem.

It forbids Jews to buy, own, or carry guns, ammunition or weapons designed for striking or thrusting. Jews now possessing such weapons must deliver them to the police at once under pain of fine or imprisonment up to five years. Foreign Jews may be exempted at the discretion of the minister of the interior.

It was announced that all Jewish business and professional activity had been “permanently” closed at Munich, birthplace of the Nazi party and fourth city of Germany.

Adolf Wagner, Nazi storm troop leader for Bavaria, in making this announcement at Munich, disclosed also that the thousands of Jews arrested throughout Germany Thursday were held as hostages.

He also said Jewish owned art objects in Munich were being confiscated.

Eight thousand Jews were arrested in Berlin alone, it was estimated.

– Middelsboro Daily News, Nov 12, 1938

Those who are trying to disarm you are planning to kill you.  Never forget that.  Never permit that. Never give the gun-grabbers so much as an inch, no matter how “reasonable” their suggested restrictions are.

MOLON LABE.

Meanwhile, Karl Denninger points out that effective gun control necessarily means disarming the police and the military too, as that is where the criminal elements will obtain their weapons if need be.

“The suspected gunman appeared to have seized firearms from two of
his victims as he moved through the building along the Anacostia River
in southeast Washington, where 3,000 Navy employees go to work each day,
many of them carrying authorized firearms.”

If the government’s desires for gun control are legitimate, then it can begin by disarming the police and the military first.

Navy Yard shooting

“A Navy spokesman says four have been killed, eight wounded in shooting at the Washington Navy Yard. #BREAKING: 4 killed and 8 injured. One shooter down #NavyYardShooting #Navy #CNICHQ”

“We urge citizens to listen to the authorities and follow directions….”
–  unnamed White House official

Well, that’s certainly a creepy response.

UPDATE: “officials said six people were killed and as many as 10 were wounded, including a law enforcement officer.”

UPDATE 2: “THIRTEEN DEAD IN NAVY YARD SHOOTING”.  Dead includes Aaron Alexis, the shooter.

Lions Den V: Brad Torgersen

Brad Torgersen is an award-winning author who was nominated for the Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula awards in 2012.  Due to his failure to be sufficiently vibrant, irreligious, or other adjective indicative of the Left’s various totems, he found himself the subject of an SFWA hate campaign to deny him the awards which bore certain similarities to my own experience with that organization. Review volunteers are now in, thank you.

Lights in the Deep is the product of three years of effort, plus one long summer of editing, proofing, packaging, and wrap-up.  It contains ten different pieces of short science fiction, all previously published in either Analog magazine, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show magazine, or L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future, vol. XXVI. This collection is my first “best of” album, and features my Writers of the Future award winner, my Analog readers’ choice award winner, and my Hugo and Nebula nominee.

I believe my job is to entertain the reader, and provide the reader with a worthwhile, uplifting experience.  I don’t write stories to shock, challenge, make the reader squirm, or (Lord help us) raise awareness.  I do write stories with the idea that “scientifiction” is about the science as much as it is about the fiction.  Since Larry Niven was perhaps my most influential template in this regard, I try to tell interesting stories featuring engaging characters, set in universes which are plausibly founded on science as we know it.  And if I stray from science as we know it, I work hard to keep my extrapolations consistent, and only bend the rules if it makes sense for them to be bent.

In related news, Larry Correia is lighting a fuse for a book bomb on Mr. Torgersen’s behalf. He explains:

“Why does Brad deserve a Book Bomb?


“First off, he’s actually an extremely good writer. Brad is the guy
who was nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, and Nebula award, all at the
same time, and who was then swiftly attacked, maligned, and sabotaged by
the inner clique of literati douchebags because he was 1. Military. 2.
An outspoken conservative. 3. Openly religious. 4. White and thus
incapable of being a ”real” writer.”

The short answer: not so much these days

A PhD candidate quits academia and explains how professional academics have ruined science:

(1) Academia: It’s Not Science, It’s Business
I’m going to start with the supposition that the goal of “science”
is to search for truth, to improve our understanding of the universe
around us, and to somehow use this understanding to move the world
towards a better tomorrow. At least, this is the propaganda that we’ve
often been fed while still young, and this is generally the propaganda
that universities that do research use to put themselves on lofty moral
ground, to decorate their websites, and to recruit naïve youngsters like
myself.
I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic
prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest –
first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own
work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty
appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly
after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too
honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s
shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are
taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be
strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is given
to good presentation over good content – a priority that, though
understandable at times, has now gone overboard. The “evil” kind of
networking (see, e.g.,http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/networking-good-vs-evil/)
seems to be openly encouraged. With so many business-esque things to
worry about, it’s actually surprising that *any* scientific research
still gets done these days. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely the
naïve PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority of
the world’s academic research is actually being done by people like me,
who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you would expect
to truly be pushing science forward with their decades of experience, do
surprisingly little and only appear to manage the PhD students, who
slave away on papers that their advisors then put their names on as a
sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read the document (sometimes,
in particularly desperate cases, they may even try to steal first
authorship). Rarely do I hear of advisors who actually go through their
students’ work in full rigor and detail, with many apparently having
adopted the “if it looks fine, we can submit it for publication”
approach.

Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the
students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little,
while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded
amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are
only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The
worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and
begins to play on the other side of the table. Every PhD student reading
this will inevitably know someone unlucky enough to have fallen upon an
advisor who has accepted this sort of management and is now inflicting
it on their own students – forcing them to write paper after paper and
to work ridiculous hours so that the advisor may advance his/her career
or, as if often the case, obtain tenure. This is unacceptable and needs
to stop….

(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick It Ever Pulled was Convincing the World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in
academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?” Year
after year, the system takes in tons of money via all sorts of grants.
Much of this money then goes to pay underpaid and underappreciated PhD
students who, with or without the help of their advisors, produce some
results. In many cases, these results are incomprehensible to all except
a small circle, which makes their value difficult to evaluate in any
sort of objective manner. In some rare cases, the incomprehensibility is
actually justified – the result may be very powerful but may, for
example, require a lot of mathematical development that you really do
need a PhD to understand. In many cases, however, the result, though
requiring a lot of very cool math, is close to useless in application.

This is fine, because real progress is slow. What’s bothersome,
however, is how long a purely theoretical result can be milked for
grants before the researchers decide to produce something practically
useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be a strong urge for
people in academia to go and apply their result, even when this becomes
possible, which most likely stems from the fear of failure – you are
morally comfortable researching your method as long as it works in
theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it and to learn
that it doesn’t work in reality.

This is written by a PhD candidate at a European university, but the problems he cites are, for the most part, imported from American universities, in which the problems are reportedly even more severe.  It is worth recalling that most of the great scientific discoveries throughout history were made by amateur scientists, not the professional academic guild that tries to claim ownership of a method and a knowledge base that long pre-dated it.

And it’s not just sour grapes from a non-finisher either. One commenter adds: “I agree with everything the author said and more. I am just extremely
disappointed at myself for not having seen it all this clearly earlier.
It took a Master’s degree, a Ph.D degree and a post-doc at the best
institutions in the world, until I started to see academia for what it
is: a paper publishing business driven mostly by people who care nothing
for the advancement of knowledge.”

I think this is why it is helpful to think about science in the tripartite terms I labeled in TIA. One should never confuse scientage or scientody for scientistry.  “Science”, as it exists today, is something of a bait-and-switch. What the PhD candidate is describing is scientistry, the practitioners of which have tried to elevate themselves on the basis of the public’s high regard for scientage and scientody. This has led to observably absurd statements such as PZ Myers’s claiming that “science is what scientists do”.

The answer is simple. Defund scientistry. Get rid of the third-rate bureaucrats and managers that have increasingly replaced the first-rate minds that used to dominate science. Return science to the technicians and the amateurs of an earlier, more successful, age.

Another commenter adds an important observation: “Science is NOT a business, science is a charitable venture funded by
government. And government is famously incompetent at getting ANYTHING
done efficiently or sensibly, because government is also not a business,
it lives off the taxpayer, few of whom even follow what their money is
being spent on. So science is a big charade where bureaucrats hire
committees of “respected” academics to make collective judgments on
distributing the government funds, so all the conniving and deal-making
and back-stabbing are a natural part of the process. It happens wherever
government spends money, not just in science.”

That also explains why so many scientists hate libertarians.  They know we see through their scam. 

The job no one wants

Zerohedge ponders why Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have both indicated that they don’t want to replace Helicopter Ben:

The next chairman’s main job is going to be deciding how soon and how aggressively to pull back on Fed programs; and as none other than Fed whisperer John Hilsenrath notes, Larry Summers’ withdrawal increases the likelihood of continuity in central-bank policy for the next few years – meaning any Fed wind-down of its easy-money programs will be slow and gradual. Of course he posits Yellen and Kohn as potential front-runners but throws Tim Geithner and Roger Ferguson back into the mix. Business-as-usual is back and the doves are in control – all the Fed needs now is bigger deficits to enable it to keep the pumps primed…

We can’t help but wonder why Summers really stepped away – is it perhaps that he knows (deep in his cold bloodless heart) just what a disaster this is all going to be and prefers to keep his ‘perceived’ legacy in place?  Now we have Geithner clearly not wanting to be touched with the Fed
s—– stick… seems like we will end up with the lowest common
denominator Fed head – great stuff.

I assume it’s going to be Janet Yellen, given Barack Obama’s fascination with his own historical significance. Also, women are less likely to feel they should be held responsible for anything they do, much less for anything that happens on their watch, and they also tend to place undue importance on being a Hultgreen-Curie candidate. So, unlike Summers and Geithner, Yellen is likely to discount the risk of catastrophic failure to her reputation. If that is true of her, and we’ll know it does if she doesn’t take herself out of the running fairly soon, then we can be fairly confident that she’ll take the system down on a conventional, consensual, and by-the-book basis.

This promises to be the ultimate Hultgreen-Curie scenario: the first female Fed Chairwoman is at the helm when the global financial system goes down.  And it would be a spectacular example if it took place while Christine Lagarde, the first female head of the International Monetary Fund, was still running the IMF.

Keeping in mind that I repeatedly issued warnings about the 2008 financial crisis beginning in 2002, here is what the current Fed frontrunner had to say about it after the fact.

“For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
– Janet Yellen, 2010

This should end well.

VPFL Week 1

93 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-0)
87 Mounds View Meerkats (0-1)

85 RR Redbeards (1-0)
52 Suburban Churchians (0-1)

80 ’63 Mercury Marauders (1-0)
55 Bailout Banksters (0-1)

90 Boot Hill Hangmen (1-0)
63 Bradford Gamma Rays (0-1)

90 Fromundah Cheezheads (1-0)
84 Bane Sidhe (0-1)

Not a bad start for the Meerkats, just not a winning one. It’s hard to recover from being down 51 points thanks to The Game Where Peyton Went Off, but I had a chance and if Arian Foster and Alfred Morris hadn’t both choked in the late games, I would have won.

In the NFL, the continued inability of Christian Ponder to play quarterback in a manner consistent with an NFL starter looks to spell out a long and tedious season for the Vikings. He has a decent line now, he has some decent receivers, and he has Adrian Peterson. A middle-aged nun should be able to throw for 200 yards and 2 TDs in that situation, but Christian Panic can’t even manage to throw a ball out of bounds without throwing an interception.

As far as the other teams go, New England looks weaker than in recent years, while Kansas City looks like it could be one of this year’s surprise playoff teams. Granted, Jacksonville is bad, but even a bad team is usually capable of making it past midfield against another bad team. Andy Reid and Alex Smith are both significant upgrades from last year.

This is, as always, your weekly NFL thread.

Featured on Faceout Books

The illustrious cover designer, Kirk DouPounce, is interviewed by Faceout Books.  It’s a fascinating technical insight, complete with step-by-step illustrations, into how the veteran cover artist goes about creating covers. In this case, he describes how he went about designing and developing the cover for A Throne of Bones:

Were there any constraints from the client? 

Yes, which actually got me into some trouble.

A couple years earlier I had designed and illustrated the cover for Summa Elvetica, a prequel of sorts to this series. It had an ecclesiastical feel to the story, so I digitally painted a medieval tapestry, a la Umberto Eco. The author and publisher were expecting the same treatment for this cover. However, after reading the rough manuscript, that direction didn’t seem as appropriate. This story was much more gritty and epic in scope. I wanted to keep the medieval ornamentation, but instead of painting a 2D tapestry I decided to create a 3D relief sculpture. Also, in place of the elf that was on Summa, the author had requested a heroine for this cover, one of the nine major characters from the story.

Because they were expecting a variation of the Summa cover, the first draft was not well received by the author or publisher. Not wanting to ditch this direction entirely, I asked the author if he would be willing to post it on his blog for feedback. And feedback he was given, over a 160 responses.

He posted the two covers side by side and asked his fan base which direction they preferred. It was pretty much split down the middle. For the most part, the criticism against the new cover related to the woman’s face. They essentially said that she made the cover look too teen YA. The author suggested putting a skull in place of the heroine. I don’t get a lot of requests to put skulls on covers, I was more than happy to comply.

Kirk is giving me a bit too much credit here.  My suggestion wasn’t just a gilded skull, but a gilded skull on the end of a post from the back of the chair, as per the description of the Sedes Ossi which serves as the Sanctal Throne and is constructed of the bones of the Four Apostles. I even sent him an image of a gilded skull stuck on top of a leg bone, which looked for all the world like the world’s most disgusting Pez dispenser.

Fortunately, Kirk was able to look past my ridiculous attempt to visually explain my idea and identify the useful elements underneath it. This is why I really enjoy working with him, because he is one of those rare artists who can understand what you want much better than you can articulate it.

Satire and statistical misrepresentation

McRapey explains himself:

Call me old fashioned, but “satire” isn’t actually defined as “the excuse I use when I’m a racist, sexist asshole on Twitter.”

That’s true, it’s the excuse he uses when he’s a rapey, sexual assailant on Whatever. And because he’s still belatedly trying to cover the fact that I caught him out lying, yesterday he was spinning matters related to his site traffic again.

At some point yesterday the site passed the 30 million all time views, “all time” in this case defined as “visits recorded by the WordPress stats program since early October 2008,” which is when the site switched over to the WordPress VIP hosting service. Note that I would take all stat information with a grain of salt; here is my standard link to explain why. For all that, 30 million views in six years doesn’t suck.

This 30 million visit milestone happens whilst some folks out there are asserting foamily that I’m lying about my site’s visitorship; the bone of contention appears to be that I note the site gets up to 50,000 visitors a day, whilst the foamy folks complain that the daily traffic is in fact nowhere near that, so therefore, I am lying.

Let’s look at the numbers he reported. 30 million WordPress page views in six years is, indeed, impressive.  However, if we simply do the math, which apparently Mr. Family Tradition of Crushing Standardized Tests couldn’t manage, we can see that 30,000,000 / (6×365) equals 13,699 WordPress pageviews per day.  And since Mr. Scalzi’s readers read about 5 daily pageviews apiece, he has averaged a grand total of 2,740 readers per day since October 2008.

This is considerably short of his claim to get “50,000 readers per day”. Not “up to 50,000 readers”, but “50,000 readers per day”. 47,260 readers short, to be precise. It also shows that the numbers I previously provided concerning Whatever’s traffic were correct. So, it appears that he’s at least beginning to come clean.

But not entirely. Note that Mr. Scalzi attempts to deceive his readers again as he falsely claims “the bone of contention appears to be that I note the site gets up to 50,000 visitors a day”, when I have repeatedly agreed that the claim of “up to 50,000 visitors a day” is true.  I even noted that he could correctly claim up to 100k visitors per day. Notice how Scalzi carefully uses the term “appears to be” when he knows perfectly well that the bone of contention is his false claim that “my site gets 50K readers a day” and “Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers”.

There is no question that John Scalzi repeatedly lied about his traffic. He publicly lied about it by a factor of more than 18. And moreover, by choosing to repeatedly represent his traffic by its all-time highs rather than its averages, he is engaging in statistical misrepresentation in order to significantly exaggerate the popularity and influence of his blog.  And he is being risibly dishonest when he declares “I scale it down a bit because, you know. I don’t wish to oversell the site’s reach.”  If he didn’t wish to oversell the site’s reach, he wouldn’t hide his statistics and then selectively report them in a statistically misleading manner in the first place!

For those interested in the technical side of things, it’s worth noting that WordPress is modestly generous with its pageviews, about 5 percent more than Google. I tend to prefer Google’s metrics myself because they have smarter engineers and their business revolves around statistics. But regardless, if you click on the Sitemeter icon on the left sidebar, you’ll see that VP has had 25,464,336 pageviews. Adjusted for the 2013 WordPress/Sitemeter ratio, that corresponds to 49,464,473 pageviews.  Those 49.4 million pageviews date back to October 2003, so I have averaged 13,552 WordPress pageviews here since then and another 6,710 per day on Alpha Game since March 2011.  That’s a total of 20,062 daily WordPress pageviews, 46 percent more than Whatever. So I must have more readers, right?

Wrong. For various reasons, my readers average 10 pageviews per day. So, I’ve averaged 2,006 readers per day over the complete history of my sites, fewer than Mr. Scalzi’s 2,740 daily post-2008 readers.  The numbers more or less double on both sides if we limit the time period to 2013, but a similar ratio remains. I have more pageviews but Mr. Scalzi has more actual readers. That’s why, when you see people citing statistics without providing the raw data, you always have to consider them carefully in order to determine whether they are being used to mislead you or not.

It is informative to observe that despite his bestselling novels and his various literary awards, Mr. Scalzi is so insecure and relentlessly self-promoting that he still feels the need to lie, spin, and statistically misrepresent his site traffic. There are numerous widgets that allow him to display his traffic openly on his site, as I and many other bloggers have always done. (I don’t display the Google stats widget on this site as I do on AG because it doesn’t work with the old Blogger template utilized here.) Until Mr. Scalzi adds such a widget to Whatever, it will be readily apparent to everyone that promulgating a false perception of popularity is more important to him than personal integrity.

UPDATE: Scalzi is still dissembling even when called on it.

“I believe the problem several of your critics have with the
reporting of your site numbers was that you said you had 50k readers per
day, before you began saying you have ‘up to’ 50 k readers per day.”

Then several of my critics are either ignorant or mendacious trolls,
because I’ve had “up to” here for years, since at least the first post
on the subject in 2010, where I talked about the problem of accurate
stats reporting. If these folks are relying on the occasional comment on
the character-limited medium of Twitter as examples of me dissembling
when accurate, detailed information on the subject is easily accessible
on my personal site at all times, volunteered by me,
then we’re back into the “mendacious troll” category. Which is not at
all surprising, given the one particular dipshit who is the most
exercised about it.

Isn’t John clever, leaping to capitalize on the questioner’s mistake in saying “before”.  Yes, Scalzi did previously refer to his traffic utilizing the misleading “up to” method; in fact he began doing so almost as soon as he had reached that level once.  The point, which McRapey specifically lied about in his statement concerning “the bone of contention”, is that for a nine-month period beginning in late 2012, Scalzi stopped claiming “up to 50k daily blog readers” and switched to claiming “50k daily blog readers”.  He went from statistically misrepresenting his traffic to straight-up lying about it.

With regards to “the character-limited medium of Twitter”, I note that McRapey had 21 spare characters in the one tweet, and 36 spare characters in the other.  I also note that “up_to_” requires all of 6 characters.  It appears he’ll throw any excuse out there without even stopping to think how easily it is demolished.

After I called him out, he retreated to mere statistical misrepresentation again.  And notice that despite his claim to provide “accurate, detailed information on the subject [that] is easily accessible
on my personal site at all times, volunteered by me”, there is still no traffic widget or Sitemeter link being displayed on Whatever.  The information McRapy provides is accurate and detailed, but it is also incomplete, misleading and observably susceptible to self-promotional spin by Mr. Scalzi.

I am pleased McRapey is finally indicating his willingness to provide accurate and detailed information.  I’m sure we all support him in that. All he has to do is display the Analytics widget for WordPress and that will remove any reason to doubt his integrity concerning his site traffic in the future.  Of course, after he does that, he might want to consider getting a head start on coming clean concerning the historical “bestseller” status of “Fuzzy Nation”….

And for the benefit of Phoenician: “______ mancrush ______ obsession _______ laughing at _______ Dipshit
______ your father_______ jealous ________ self-made ______ lawn
______”