Still waiting on Simon and Slamdunk to email me. You have until the end of day tomorrow, and then I’ll need to draft replacements. So, if either of you still want into the league, please email me with VPFL in the subject.
Category: Uncategorized
When egos collide
I thought you all might find this Twitter exchange to be as amusing as I did. Surgeons are notorious for their arrogance, while your humble host is not exactly known for being devoid of confidence.
Vox Day @voxday
A published study appears to have detected vaccine fraud in a CDC study of autism and the MMR vaccine.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday No, not so much. But your swallowing that codswallop whole shows just how little you know about science.Vox Day @voxday
@gorskon Amusing. You clearly don’t even understand the difference between statistical review and science. You’re science-illiterate.Sebastian Armstrong @spikesandspokes
@voxday @gorskon Hilarious, he is a cancer surgeon who has been part of breast cancer research, and YOU think HE is science-illiterate!Vox Day @voxday
@spikesandspokes @gorskon He observably is science-illiterate. Statistical analysis is not science. Neither, for that matter, is surgery.Vox Day @voxday
@spikesandspokes @gorskon We’re getting ready for our fantasy football draft. Or, as you science-illiterates would call it, “doing science”.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Says the guy who has never published in the scientific literature and thinks he knows science.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes As opposed to
someone (me) who has actually published multiple scientific papers,
including one coauthor in NatureVox Day @voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes No, says the guy whose scientific hypotheses have been turned into multiple published papers and cited by Nature.David Gorski @gorskon
@spikesandspokes Don’t worry. @voxday amuses me with his arrogance of ignorance with respect to science, particularly vaccine science.Vox Day @voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes You’re the one dumb enough to claim statistical review is science, not me.Vox Day @voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes BFD. Nature has also cited one of my original hypotheses. And it doesn’t erase your basic blunder re statistics.Vox Day @voxday 2h
@gorskon @spikesandspokes But your logically fallacious appeal to credentials does amuse me. Now, I’ve got to get back to my draft science.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Also, hypotheses are a dime a dozen. Hypotheses that stand up to scientific scrutiny are what matter, silly boy.Vox Day @voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes They did, Mr. Doctor Scientist. That’s kind of the point.Vox Day @voxday @gorskon @spikesandspokes I’m not worried.
Your insecurity is hilarious. Nobody gives a damn about your
credentials, Mr. Doctor Scientist.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes Who’s more insecure, the guy w/ actual scientific accomplishments (me) or the guy who brags about hypothese (you)?Vox Day @voxday
@gorskon @spikesandspokes I don’t brag about it. You’re the one who rushed to cite Nature, not me. I simply pointed out: BFD. So, you.David Gorski @gorskon
@voxday @spikesandspokes And you’re the one who bragged first about a hypothesis cited in Nature.Vox Day @voxday now
@gorskon @spikesandspokes Wrong again. I responded at 2:59 to your mention of Nature at 2:57. Science illiterate and can’t tell time either?
One thing I’ve noticed about scientists is that they never seem to understand that their expertise in one particular area doesn’t translate very well, if at all, into unrelated areas. That’s why it is so easy to trip them up; their rush to defend their wounded intellectual vanity leads them from one error into another.
And, of course, they always retreat to their credentials and citations in lieu of being able to actually argue their way out of a paper bag. It’s probably a character flaw, but I do love it when this sort of situational moron decides to take a crack at me.
UPDATE: To be fair to the guy, I was the first one to mention Nature. And, since apparently none of my would-be critics are smart enough to search the blog, the hypothesis referenced is obviously my argument demonstrating that religion does not cause war, which has been cited everywhere from Foreign Policy to Wikipedia to Nature to The New York Times. And as for anyone who wants to resort to the obvious dodge of crediting The Encyclopedia of Wars, well, I will simply laugh at you and observe that while I have it, and have read it, you obviously haven’t ever even laid eyes upon it.
Why history matters
Over at Alpha Game, there is a discussion of a new survey showing that marrying a non-virgin indicates a 21 percent reduction in the likelihood of HER marital satisfaction compared to a woman whose sexual experience is limited to her husband. And marrying a promiscuous woman (defined as 10+ premarital partners), reduces her marital satisfaction by 58 percent. This should settle, once and for all, any question concerning the observable fact that men strongly prefer to marry women with less experience.
And before any female readers resort to their usual “but what about the mens” response, do read the survey.
This is an interesting test of whether feminism actually concerns itself with what is observably good for women or whether it is more concerned with defending the sub-optimal decisions of certain women.
The wrong battleground
Roger Simon needs to stop worrying about other men’s pants and start looking at the consequences of the idiot interventionist and immigrationist policies he has advocated in the past:
In other words, it’s time for libertarians to put on their big boy pants and give some serious thought not just to national defense but to global defense, because I have some news for them: The Pax Americana was the real deal. It worked for decades, saving myriad lives, and now it’s almost gone. We have seen that writ large for us in the last few years as never before. Obama’s non-existent, feckless, reactionary, confused, absurd (or whatever other adjective you want to pick) “leading from behind” foreign policy has brought the world to the brink of madness as nothing since WWII.
These days the man carrying the libertarian mantle most prominently — Senator Rand Paul — is off curing Guatemalans of eye disease. Laudable an enterprise as that is, I am less interested in what Paul can do for a few indigent Guatemalans as I am how he would respond to that other ophthalmologist/politician Bashir Assad. And not just Assad, of course, all of them.
It’s not enough to say we would respond as necessary. We live in a peanut-sized globe. What happens in Singapore redounds in San Diego and so forth. Paul has been a captivating candidate so far with some original ideas and approaches, but given the way the world is headed he is going to have to pull on his big boy pants and start articulating how he will deal with this escalating era of jihad.
And as for those libertarians who still prefer an isolationist approach, I can first remind them of Reagan’s advice about the necessity of a strong defense in order to have peace. If they don’t believe that, then I can promise them they will meet head on the famous prophecy of that same Comrade Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Simon doesn’t stop to think that the reason the USA is in such a parlous state is the direct result of a) American military interventions, and b) America’s quasi-open immigration policies. It’s always interesting to see naive commentators ignorant of basic military history babbling about war, because the Clausewitzian center of gravity is NOT in the Middle East, Syria, or even Iraq. It is in the West. The war in the East cannot be seriously fought until the war in the West is won; contra the insistence of the WWI-era generals, offense is not the way to win a war.
UPDATE: To say nothing of the fact that this is the same guy who wanted the USA to remove Assad from power last year, which would have assured that ISIS was even better established in the region than it is now.
Vaccine fraud at the CDC?
Despite the vaccine makers thinking they had put the Wakefield controversy safely behind them, another researcher has uncovered an apparent link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and from the CDC’s own data:
Background
A significant number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder suffer a loss of previously-acquired skills, suggesting neurodegeneration or a type of progressive encephalopathy with an etiological basis occurring after birth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectof the age at which children got their first Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine on autism incidence. This is a reanalysis of the data set, obtained from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), used for the Destefano et al. 2004 publication on the timing of the first MMR vaccine and autism diagnoses.Methods
The author embarked on the present study to evaluate whether a relationship exists between child age when the first MMR vaccine was administered among cases diagnosed with autism and controls born between 1986 through 1993 among school children in metropolitan Atlanta. The Pearson’s chi-squared method was used to assess relative risks of receiving an autism diagnosis within the total cohort as well as among different race and gender categories.Results
When comparing cases and controls receiving their first MMR vaccine before and after 36 months of age, there was a statistically significant increase in autism cases specifically among African American males who received the first MMR prior to 36 months of age. Relative risks for males in general and African American males were 1.69 (p=0.0138) and 3.36 (p=0.0019), respectively. Additionally, African American males showed an odds ratio of 1.73 (p=0.0200) for autism cases in children receiving their first MMR vaccine prior to 24 months of age versus 24 months of age and thereafter.
The troubling thing here is that the author of the paper, “Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data” reached his conclusions by examining CDC data that reached the opposite conclusion and served as the basis for a CDC doctor’s testimony before Congress. Bill Sardi writes on Lew Rockwell:
There is evidence of an intentional cover-up as it is alleged that data
from children who did not have birth certificates (not a pertinent
factor) was removed from the study to reduce the statistical power of
the study and claim there was no significant association between autism
and the MMR vaccine…. Dr. Hooker notes that the CDC used children under the age of 3 for a
comparison (control) group, which is an intentional way of skewing
results of its studies involving any alleged link between vaccines and
autism. Symptoms of autism generally don’t emanate among children till
after age 3 and the control group was too young to have received a
diagnosis of autism, he notes.
Not only does this “reanalysis of CDC data” reopen the possible MMR-autism link, but it calls into question the integrity of the entire field of vaccine research. If Hooker is correct and CDC doctors such as Dr. Colleen Boyle have engaged in vaccine fraud, it will entirely explode the basic assumption that vaccines are safe because it will render all of the CDC’s data and assurances suspect.
A few things
This isn’t actually the correct cover, but Emilio has translated both A Man Disrupted and Gravity Kills into Spanish and I just finished the ebook formatting for QUANTUM MORTIS La Gravedad Mata. So, if you speak fluent Spanish and would like to read over the two books and pass on any suggestions for improvement, I would appreciate it. I should have Un Hombre Disperso ready in a week or two as I’m hoping to release them in the company of another book or three come Labor Day Weekend. Shoot me an email with SPANISH in the subject if you’d like me to send you QM-LGM now and QM-UHD when it is ready.
In completely unrelated news, the six new members of the VPFL, as determined by RANDOM.ORG will be:
- Daniel
- Simon
- Vincent Castrillo
- Slamdunk
- Drew Deuce’s
- Jartstar
Please email me with VPFL in the subject so I can assign you a team and send you the league invitations.
Restoring Christendom
Lest you think it is not necessary to end the ill-considered concept of religious pluralism and repatriate the adherents of the religion of peace:
“If norwegian soldiers can take planes to Afghanistan, then Osama and Mohammed can also take planes to Norway, inshaAllah. Now, the government must wake up and assume responsibility, before this war spreads to Norway. Before the counterpart reacts. Before moslems take the step necessary.
Do not confuse the moslems’ silence with weakness. Do not profit from the moslems’ patience. Do not force us to do something that can be avoided. This is not a threat, only the words of truth. The words of justice.
A warning that the consequences can be fatal. A warning about a 9/11 on norwegian ground, or larger attacks than the one carried out on 22 july. This is for your own good and in your own best interest.’
We do not want to be a part of norwegian society. And we do not consider it necessary either to move away from Norway, because we were born and grew up here. And Allah’s earth belongs to everybody.
But let Grønland become ours. Bar this city quarter and let us control it the way we wish to do it. This is the best for both parts.
We do not wish to live together with dirty beasts like you.
Likewise. But Grønland is not theirs. Norway is not theirs. Does the West belong to them? Or does it belong to the Men of the West? Whether Norway realizes it or not, they are now actively engaged in a war of invasion and conquest. So is the rest of Europe. As is America. This is not a war that can be fought “over there”, it is a war that will have to be fought in every nation and every city across the West.
The War on Terror was a proxy and a cheap, cowardly one. The problem is that secular pluralism will not survive this challenge from Muslims. There is absolutely no point in appealing to secular pluralism, as it was always a fundamentally incoherent concept. It is only a matter of time before it is abandoned, and the sooner we return to the concept of Christian European nations, including the USA, the better off everyone will be.
Maximizing liberty does not encompass violence enforced partition and Sharia. We already know from the Israeli-Palestinian example what the results of that sort of partition will be. And we already know what the eventual solution will be.
Call to strip British citizenship from ‘traitors’ who fight for Isil. Britons who fight for Isil in Iraq and Syria should be considered traitors and stripped of their British citizenship, the former shadow home secretary has said.
As the Norwegian example indicates, such actions will only be the start, which will eventually culminate in an eventual ban on Islam in most Western countries. There is already widespread support for such action, and it will grow rapidly with each new atrocity. Remember, the first Reconquista took 700 years. The second one won’t take as long, but it probably won’t be complete in our lifetimes either.
Trolls are not a problem
I found no little amusement in this article in the New York Times about dealing with online trolls. It always surprises me when I learn that other bloggers are genuinely upset by the weird little creatures who occasionally infest their blogs:
ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.
In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain.
The singular goal of the troll is to elicit pain? I don’t think that is entirely correct, but that is certainly one reason why we haven’t seen all that much troll activity here despite the considerable growth of traffic here. With the exceptions of the homosexual Tad and the literary critic Andrew Marston (who doesn’t have a job per se, but volunteers regularly at the New England Wildlife Center if you ever feel like giving him a call and discussing literature with him), most trolls have discovered that they can’t elicit anything more mild annoyance from me and thereby give up. Tad, Marston, Pox, and Obvious are a different variety, they are various forms of what might be described as the crusader-troll.
The crusader-troll attempts to DISQUALIFY DISQUALIFY the blogger by presenting alternate narratives to the blog readers. Hence we have Tad always trying to reframe the narrative with Vox as Pure Evil, Marston going to blogs far and wide to declare that Vox, Larry Correia, and Dan Simmons(?) are Terrible Writers, Pox/Ann openly trying to pick off readers in order to limit the extent of my baleful intellectual influence, and Obvious attempting to portray the mysterious “blogger” or “host” as Hypocritical, while the Scalzi fanboy Phoenician spent over a year attempting to show Vox as Inferior to the Object of Adoration. The fact that their disqualification attempts have obviously failed, as the blog traffic grew from 612,136 pageviews in August 2012 to over 1.5 million in August 2014 doesn’t ever seem to register with them. Perhaps they’re not trolling hard enough?
Of the crusading variety, I tend to find Marston the most amusing because I am aware I cause him far more pain than he causes me. (To say nothing of his fascinating attempts at fantasy fiction which are much more entertaining than all the 2014 Hugo winners combined. I even offered to publish Nocturne; it is guaranteed Hugo-Award winning material.) Every new Twitter follower I get, every additional 100k pageviews of traffic, and every new SF award for which I am nominated causes him pain. In fact, if he hadn’t gone on such an insane literary-snob rampage a while back and annoyed so many people, I very much doubt that Sad Puppies 2 would have been such a big success. Science fiction can thank Luscinia/Marston for the fact that Larry and I, among others, are bona-fide Hugo-nominated authors from now until the end of time. My author’s bio has been burnished thanks to the blog troll.
That, my friends, is what you call backfire. Well done, Andrew. But he will never learn because he is too neuro-atypical to grasp normal human psychology. He will continue to poke the bears because he has deemed the bears to be Evil, never understanding the wisdom implicit in the notion of letting sleeping grizzlies lie.
(That being said, it’s also amusing to me that my shadow troll, Ann Morgan aka Pox Vay, gets more traffic and comments than many blogs, and even has her own meta-troll, Obviously. This comment by her was downright funny too: “I also confess to being immature in some ways, mainly I lack confidence,
patience, and sometimes have poor control over my temper.” You don’t say.)
There will always be trolls. There are too many immature, attention-seeking, emotionally unstable individuals sans audiences for there not to be. But they are no reason for concern. Quite to the contrary, they are a material testament to the fact that you matter, that you are making a difference. I wouldn’t worry about trolls if I were the average blogger. I would worry more about having such a small audience, or so little of import to say, that the trolls feel no temptation to show up.
Kids know they’re smart
The smart guy from Khan Academy appears to be taking some unnecessary precautions:
The Learning Myth: Why I’m Cautious About Telling My Son He’s Smart
My 5-year-old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell-tale signs of a “growth mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.
Considering that his son started reading two years later than me, most of my high-IQ friends, and most of our children, I suspect Salman Khan can relax a bit. Anyhow, I always find this issue of “telling kids they’re smart or not” to be amusing. It’s exactly like debating whether to tell a kid he’s tall or not.
I mean, do you seriously think the kid is not going to notice? Especially if he is, in fact, actually smart? My parents never told me I was smart. It was just kind of hard not to notice when I was sitting there in kindergarten reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while the other kids were eating paste, licking the doorknobs, and urinating on themselves.
If Khan wants to make sure his son struggles, that’s easy enough. Throw some long division at him. Make him read in another language. Give him Cicero and Plato to read. In fairness, I don’t tell my son he’s smart, I just tell him to keep a straight face when his teammates lament the long division problems they’re struggling with, to help them out if they ask for it, and avoid ever letting them see the collection of alien hieroglyphics that pass for his math problems. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of his face when I introduced him to the “silent gh”. He loved the “silent e”, but I’m 100 percent certain he thought I was screwing with him until I showed him a list of numbers that included a spelled-out “eight”.
The important thing is to teach the highly intelligent not to coast on their capabilities, not to mistake potential for achievement, and to show them how to respect the less-intelligent. Intellectual arrogance in a child is as natural and as innocent as athletic arrogance. It must be kept in check, but one can’t do that by pretending there is no reason for it to exist in the first place.
We don’t pretend that children don’t come in different shapes and sizes, and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t come with different cognitive capabilities as well. I also find it rather amusing that a guy with a five year-old thinks he has discovered secret of raising smart kids. Come back in thirteen years, sport, and we’ll see what you think you know.
Africa belongs to them
It is becoming increasingly obvious that all of the international do-gooder efforts in Africa for the last 100 years have not only been pointless, but were actually counterproductive:
Mob Destroys Ebola Center In Liberia Two Days After It Opens
A mob descended on the center at around 5:30 p.m., chanting, “No Ebola in West Point! No Ebola in West Point!” They stormed the front gate and pushed into the holding center. They stole the few gloves someone had donated this morning, and the chlorine sprayers used to disinfect the bodies of those who die here, all the while hollering that Ebola is a hoax.
They ransacked the protective suits, the goggles, the masks. They destroyed part of Tarplah’s car as he was fleeing the crowd. Jemimah Kargbo, a health care worker at a clinic next door, said they took mattresses and bedding, utensils and plastic chairs.
“Everybody left with their own thing,” she said. “What are they carrying to their homes? They are carrying their deaths.”
She said the police showed up but the crowd intimidated them.
“The police were there but they couldn’t contain them. They started threatening the police, so the police just looked at them,” she said.
And then mob left with all of the patients.
“They said, ‘The president says you have Ebola, but you don’t have Ebola, you have malaria. Get up and go out!’” Kargbo said.
The West is going to pull out of Africa sooner or later. Sooner, if the current Ebola epidemic is any indication. This means that Africa will be right back where it was in the 1940s, only now the African nations are unable to feed themselves because their populations have been massively inflated beyond what their maintainable infrastructure is able to support.
The only thing that the Western aid workers have been able to accomplish in the current crisis is bringing Ebola back to their native lands.