Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: Porky predicts Obamacare

I find Porky’s political wise man act to be a little tedious, so I’m going to make sure I don’t forget this prediction by posting it here.  Porky wrote:

Are you incapable of seeing that the Obamacare rollout was a planned failure? Do you not understand the progressive tactic of lowered expectations?

The website will be functioning reasonably well by December (I suspect they’ve had the fix all along) at which time Obama will announce his glorious Christmas gift to humanity is “not perfect, but it’s improving every day and children and pregnant women are safe now.” The argument will have been successfully shifted from “should there even be socialized medicine” to “how can we make socialized medicine work.”

Mission accomplished. Another brilliant progressive tactic made possible by the type of foolishness we see in the OP.

So, Porky predicts there will be no delayed implementations, the Obamacare site registrations will be working smoothly within 30 days, and Obama will make a public announcement to that effect.

If he’s correct, I will congratulate him and take his predictions more seriously in the future. If he’s not, we’ll be able to safely dismiss his particular brand of political conspiracy theory.

Savages and the post-civilized

Daniel Greenfield observes that for the current administration, technology appears to be nothing more than magic:

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress….

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it’s why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work….

The difference between savages and civilized men isn’t that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It’s the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.

Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can’t build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.

This is almost exactly what I pointed out that so upset the inept futurists in the SFWA. This is exactly what I meant when I observed that a society of NK Jemisins have never been known to successfully establish or maintain an advanced civilization. And no amount of banning the badthoughts or badthinkers – talk about magical thinking – is going to prevent Western civilization from declining and falling now that post-civilized have seized control and the savages and half-savages are permanently ensconced inside the gates.

It doesn’t matter if you call me raciss, Detroit is still bankrupt and decaying. It doesn’t matter if you call me sexiss, the US birth rate is still plummeting and the population demographics are still dysgenic, in terms of intellectual, educational, and time-preferential genetics.

I don’t create or control any of this. It’s not a figment of my imagination. I do nothing more than observe the historical facts and draw connections between them and what is readily apparent today. What disturbs people is less the nature of my observations and more the fear that my observations are correct. It’s not as if my contentions are unfalsifiable, or that people are not going to notice when the course of events eventually goes more or less the way I have predicted.

I’m entirely accustomed to people thinking I’m crazy and being offended by my perspective. Remember, I left the USA 15 years ago. I was pointing out NSA spying back in 2001, and observing the precarious state of the global financial system in 2002. And even if you are absolutely certain that I am an unmitigated white supremacist, what are your substantive grounds for thinking that I am incorrect now?

Relying on a known logical fallacy, the Genetic Fallacy, and hoping for the best is little more than the very magical thinking that is part of the problem here.

Conspiracy history, not conspiracy theory

As more and more historical conspiracies come to light, the government guard dogs are set on those who have methodically exposed them:

The more information we have about what governments and corporations are up to the less we seem to trust them. Will conspiracy theories eventually destroy democracy?

What if I told you I had conclusive proof that the moon landings were faked, but I had been told to keep it under wraps by my BBC bosses acting under orders from the CIA, NSA and MI6. Most of you would think I had finally lost my mind.

But, for some, that scenario – a journalist working for a mainstream media organisation being manipulated by shadowy forces to keep vital information from the public – would seem entirely plausible, or even likely.

We live in a golden age for conspiracy theories. There is a growing assumption that everything we are told by the authorities is wrong, or not quite as it seems. That the truth is being manipulated or obscured by powerful vested interests.

And, in some cases, it is.

“The reason we have conspiracy theories is that sometimes governments and organisations do conspire,” says Observer columnist and academic John Naughton.

It would be wrong to write off all conspiracy theorists as “swivel-eyed loons,” with “poor personal hygiene and halitosis,” he told a Cambridge University Festival of Ideas debate.

They are not all “crazy”. The difficult part, for those of us trying to make sense of a complex world, is working out which parts of the conspiracy theory to keep and which to throw away.

Mr Naughton is one of three lead investigators in a major new Cambridge University project to investigate the impact of conspiracy theories on democracy.

The lack of faith in democracy has nothing to do with the electorate being provided with more information about the behavior of its government regardless of how accurate that information is. The growing loss of belief in democracy as a system of government is a direct result of the electorate observing that no matter for whom and for what it votes, the ruling elite imposes whatever laws it wants.

And, as it happens, the Conspiracy Theory of History is the only one that can be supported by the historical facts.

My central belief with regards to all the various conspiracies is simple. The only thing you can be completely 100 percent certain of is that the one thing that absolutely did not happen is the government-approved, media-reported Official Story. The one and only thing that makes me suspect that the Moon landings were faked is the way various government employees and officials take the charges so seriously.

Well, that and the fact that Moon landings appear to be the one thing that 40+ years of technological advancement have rendered both more expensive and less possible.

Orson Scott Card on SFWA

The author of Ender’s Game expresses the reasons he disdains the SFWA, but perhaps more importantly, he echoes my previous point about why the post-80s SF authors repeatedly show themselves to be unable to produce fiction that is as compelling or as relevant as their predecessors even when they are expressly trying to mimic it:

What I find interesting is the people who commit and keep their commitment at great personal cost, the grown-up story, the story of parents, the story of people who sacrifice for community but stay in it and have to live in the mess they made. … They don’t take off their mask and go back into society under another name. They have to be who they are, wear their own face in their community.

This has made some critics very uncomfortable right from the start. And as my politics diverged from the political correctness that has captured the left — I mean, (in) 1976 I was a Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberal Democrat — and without changing any of my principles, I’ve now become quite a right-winger in the eyes of the left. And I’m a little baffled by it because I’m a liberal and they’re not. They’re repressive, punishing, intolerant of the slightest variation, absolutely the opposite of what it means to be a liberal. But that’s the way it goes. They still get the label. I am the fact of what it meant to be a liberal. I find the most liberals who feel like I do among people who are labeled as conservatives. It’s a very odd thing.

But that political thing has affected the criticism of my work. And it would just make me crazy to read asinine, irrelevant comments by critics who think they’re saying something intelligent.

You see, what happens is, if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. And that’s all I get from science fiction literary elite. If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing since they’ve never actually formed the kind of community bonds that my fiction always depends on. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They couldn’t produce that fiction if they tried because they don’t share those values.

This is absolutely true. “They have no idea what I’m talking about.” That’s precisely what one sees wherever the SFWA fascists are discussing something written by Card, me, or some other outlaw of SF. They literally don’t understand it. Look at how many people threw a hissy fit about my comments concerning NK Jemisin and thought that I was saying I was more homo sapiens sapiens than she was. It’s not worth bothering to explain it to them, because the whole point is to take offense in order to justify taking action.

As he observes: “Just writing honestly makes them attack me because they can’t bear a
favorable depiction of someone they disagree with. It’s intolerable to
them. They are arch-fanatical puritans. They can’t bear the thought that
someone somewhere who is intelligent might not hold the same idea as
them. It’s the essence of intolerance, and that’s the way they are.”

It is the way they are. And it drives them absolutely insane that more successful, more intelligent people not only don’t hold the same ideas as them, but hold them in complete contempt. The fact is that they are nothing but parasites. Consider: after openly ripping off Heinlein, John Scalzi has openly declared his hopes that Old Man’s War can catch a ride on the coattails of the Ender’s Game movie… and Scalzi’s mediocre derivatives are literally the award-winning best that the current SFWA community presently has to offer.

Top 10 Game blogs

The quarterly report on the Top 10 Game blogs for the third
quarter of 2013 is now up on Alpha Game. What is most interesting about it is the way it shows
considerable growth across the board, in line with the widespread
expectations that the Androsphere would begin garnering more mainstream
attention this year.

  1. Return of Kings: 19,257 (+23,568)
  2. A Voice for Men 31,452 (new to list)
  3. Roissy: 35,799 (+19,649)

See the rest of the list there. I found two things to be interesting. First was the fact that every single top Game blog significantly increased its Alexa ranking in the third quarter. Second was the observation that the Androsphere’s gamma male critics, who frequently try to claim that no one reads the Game bloggers, happen to have considerably less traffic than the leading Game bloggers do.

This means we can expect more hysteria and more nonsensical attacks on the Androsphere as it becomes increasingly evident that more and more men are breaking their cultural conditioning and coming to terms with at least some aspects of the Game perspective on intersexual relations.

And on a tangential note, I was reminded of a previous question from a reader concerning the apparent dichotomy between my claim of more Google pageviews than McRapey and Whatever’s higher Alexa ranking.

You may recall this McRapey tweet: “All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa” 

It is little ironic, but as it happens, Whatever’s global Alexa ranking is still slightly higher than VP’s despite the US rankings now falling in line with the actual pageview traffic. Despite the big day in August that McRapey cited in a futile attempt to support his wildly exaggerated readership claims, not only has VP surpassed Whatever, but Alpha Game is fast catching up as well.

Alexa Rank in USA
23,846  Vox Popoli
47,018  Whatever
58,514  Alpha Game

Hey, at least he still has the most popular blog in SFWA, right? To say nothing of his Participation Hugo. Anyhow, given the way in which the mainstream media has barely begun to become aware of Game, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alpha Game also passed up Whatever in the USA by this time next year.

Rules of Writing V

5. Thou shalt remember that there are four primary elements of a novel

Of the elements of a novel there are four, and four shall be the number of the elements. To two elements thou shalt not limit thyself, neither shalt thou write three, excepting in that thou proceedeth to four.

What are the four elements? They are the four foundations upon which I base my book reviews. Prose, Plot, Characters, and Ideas.

This identification of the four elements relates to the problem we discussed yesterday with a considerable amount of what is best described as women’s fiction, or if one prefers, fiction that merely happens to be predominantly written by women, published by women, and read by women. Which is to say most fiction today. For example, yesterday there were two very different takes on the writer Alice Munro, whose anthology of short stories presently heads the New York Times bestseller’s list.

Cretin wrote: “Alice Munro’s short stories are gifts to any reader with a discerning
eye and who is attracted to beautiful and insightful prose.”

Holmwood agreed, but added: “I’m willing to stipulate that she deserved the Nobel. She is a much more
talented prose artist than Vox Day or Larry Correia or Tom Clancy. But so what? The prose was indeed
fantastic. The content was hideously dull, pedestrian and outright
annoying.”

In other words, Ms Munro’s work is exceptionally strong in the first element, but apparently much weaker in the other three. That is enough to appeal to a certain type of reader, of whom there are clearly enough to land an author on the bestseller lists, but leaves a statistically significant group of readers totally uninterested in her books.  Clancy was notoriously tight with his Plot. Correia is strong on both Plot and Characters. I suspect most readers would say that I fare best in the Ideas compartment, with Prose being my area of weakness.

The point is that it’s not enough to write well, not even exceptionally well. One still has to write ABOUT SOMETHING. One could theoretically write a stylistically beautiful grocery list, or compose a litany of personal grievances that is full of literary pyrotechnics, but at the end of the day, what one has is a lovely wrapped box with nothing in it. If the end result of all the gorgeous prose is a finger-wagging lecture to Be Nice or Be Yourself or Sexiss is Bad, it’s worse than a box of nothing, it’s as if the author has condemned the reader to open a gift-wrapped fart.

What distinguishes a great novel from lesser novels is that all four elements are strong and in balance with each other. Let’s consider two very well-known novels, one that is considered great and one that is considered well-loved, but not great, and see how they fall into the four categories.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Prose: “Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the
novel. His narrative structure is noted for its “god-like” ability to
hover over and within events, but also in the way it swiftly and
seamlessly portrayed a particular character’s point of view. His use of
visual detail is often cinematic in its scope, using the literary
equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic
interest to battles and ballrooms alike. These devices, while not
exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose
in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master.” 10/10

Plot: Let’s just say “check” and leave it at that. It’s freaking WAR AND PEACE. 10/10

Characters: Powerful portraits of everyone from real historical characters to the fictional aristocrats of the five families. While perhaps not as unforgettable as the characters from Anna Karenina, the fact that the author wrote Anna Karenina should suffice to prove that he was more than competent when it came to characterizations. 9/10

Ideas: Brilliant. Mind-blowingly brilliant and may have inspired Kondratiev, Schumpeter, and Prechter.  “The 19th century Great Man Theory claims that historical events are the result of the actions of “heroes” and other great individuals, Tolstoy argues that this is impossible because of how rarely these actions result in great historical events. Rather, he argues, great historical events are the result of many smaller events driven by the thousands of individuals involved, (he compares this to Calculus, and the sum of infinitesimals). He then goes on to argue that these smaller events are the result of an inverse relationship between necessity and free-will, necessity being based on reason and therefore explainable by historical analysis, and free-will being based on “consciousness” and therefore inherently unpredictable.” 10/10

Total: 39/40. Verdict: Great Novel.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

Prose: Effective, evocative, but aimed at children. 7/10

Plot: Fast-paced, efficient, and entertaining from start to finish. Too short to harbor any twists and turns beyond the resurrection. 8/10

Characters: Flawless and unforgettable. Even the secondary characters, like Trumpkin and the captain of the White Witch’s secret police, Maugrim, are powerfully portrayed. 10/10

Ideas: Clever, but derivative. From the concept of the closet to another world borrowed from George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin to the entire world being a parable for the Christian religion, Lewis is putting a fresh and shiny polish on existing ideas. 6/10.

Total: 31/40. Verdict: Good book, but without such exceptional characters and the power of the Christian narrative, would probably have been forgotten by now.

So, the reason we see the Tolstoy book as being a Great Novel while the best-known, most successful Lewis book is merely a well-loved novel is because the Prose and the Idea elements are stronger in Tolstoy.

Most fiction is lacking in two elements. Historically, the so-called male genres tended to be lacking in Prose and Characters. The female genres tended to be lacking in Prose, Plot, and Ideas since most woman-written fiction utilizes a single plot: will the reader’s representative choose Male A or Male B?(1)  I suspect this is why female writers historically tended to be more successful in the mystery genre; the structural limits imposed upon the genre by its nature tended to reduce ability to rely upon The One Plot.

What changed over the last forty years in SF/F is that more writers of both sexes with stronger, better-trained Prose skills and a greater interest in Characters entered the field, but what they didn’t realize is that they had little in the way of Ideas and their substitution of conventional and feminist left-wing ideology for original Ideas tended to cripple their Characters despite their greater interest in it.

So, whether you make use of an outline or you are disposed towards simply making up your story as you go along, you should be cognizant of what you, as a writer, have to offer the reader in terms of the four primary elements. No writer has it all; we all have strengths in some areas and weaknesses in the other. And whether one decides to try to shore up a weakness or compensate for it by providing excellence in one particular area, understanding where one’s strengths and weaknesses are should help one write better fiction.

(1) There is also the thinly disguised alternative to The One Plot, in which Male B is actually herself, her freedom, her education, her career, etc. It would be interesting to research what percentage of female fiction boils down to dithering between two options for several hundred pages. It’s basically shopping by proxy.

Multiculturalism is isolationism

Roissy brings the atomized wedges to our attention:

i was on transit today and it seems like white people are getting less and less common. just disappearing. transit is like a microcosm of multiculturalism. dead eyed somalians sitting awkwardly next to old chinese ladies. nothing in common. acknowledging each other as mere objects. no sign of life. riding by ugly buildings with grey skies above.

That reminds me of the last time I was in London. There was not a single white person on the train that evening, as I was the only individual of even partial English descent. No one was speaking, everyone was simply sitting there in stolid silence, tolerating the presence of the others with no sense of community whatsoever.

This is to be celebrated?  I don’t think so. This is indefinitely sustainable? I doubt it. I very much doubt it.

Don’t forget, post-racialists, your ideal outcome is ME. You dream of a world where various races are all blended together so you can’t even tell what someone is by looking at them?  Then look at a picture of me. I am that future. I am that nightmare you cannot guilt or browbeat into submission by crying raciss because racial identity and racial guilt mean absolutely nothing to me.

Man up and read chick-lit

It’s always fascinating to watch a gamma male attempt to utilize female shaming tactics on other men. It’s not only that it can’t possibly work, but that it’s done so ineptly:

Last week I suggested it may be time to disband Britain’s Orange Prize, which is restricted to female authors, on the grounds that since only women buy and read books nowadays all literature is by definition “women’s literature” and the need for the prize is therefore obsolete.

I was kidding (sort of), but my larger point — men do not read — is not disputed by anyone. Study after study proves that men account for less than 20 percent of the book market in England, the U.S. and Canada. This fact no longer in dispute, the only question becomes why don’t men read? Why do they choose to forego Twain’s “advantage?”

It turns out that the whole problem is — you guessed it! — women’s fault. At least that’s the answer if you ask the few guys who actually do read books, especially if they happen to be writers themselves, or worked at some point in the publishing industry.

Take Jason Pinter, for example, writing at the Huffington Post. A thriller writer who used to work in publishing, he argues that men actually do read. The notion they don’t is a self-fulfilling prophecy: “[P]ublishers rarely publish for men and don’t market towards men,” he writes.

“Nobody can deny the fact that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women,” Pinder writes. “Saying the ratio is 75/25 is not overstating things. So needless to say when a male editor pitches a book aimed at men, there are perilously few men to read it and give their opinions.”

Will Weaver, who writes young adult books, goes further, blaming not only publishing but our entire culture. Also at the Huffington Post, his indictment is much the same as Pinder’s, though. He describes going to Manhattan bookstore, where the Teen Section, all flowery and fem, contained 275 books for girls and a handful of fantasy titles for boys.

“The bias against boy books in publishing has gotten so bad nowadays that my editor now reads manuscripts, he confessed, with an eye toward ‘re-gendering,’” Weaver writes. “That is, ‘I sort of like this novel but what if the main character were a girl instead of a boy?’”

I’ll grant Weaver has a point about the need for more effort to attract boys to reading, and I’ll give Pinder props for writing respectfully of women in publishing. His critique is institutional.

Still, these writers (and others before them, like Stephen King or Chris Goldberg), however sensitive and reasonable they may be, come down ultimately to this: Publishing has been feminized, nothing is marketed to men. In other words, it’s no our fault if we don’t read. It’s the women. Again.

As a man who has read all his life, I find this faintly patronizing and more than a little insulting. I have to be marketed to before I can turn off the TV or the video game and read a book? Geez, Mom, is my bottle warm yet? I’m hungry.

These arguments ignore that women not only read all the chicklit — female readers dominate the categories I would consider male-centric, like espionage/thriller (69 percent), mystery/detective (86 percent), science fiction (52 percent). That’s according to a 2000 study — the figures may be worse today.

Given the surprising note of whining in these masculine essays, I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t read because — well, because they aren’t men. They’re spoiled little crybabies,  and adolescents who refuse to grow up.

How, one wonders, does a disinclination to read what women like to read – which is to say books like The Hunger Games, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and the current NYT bestseller, Dear Life, by Alice Munro, which features stories such as this one: “A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a
TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head
doctor” – somehow translate into being a spoiled little crybaby or an adolescent?

Then again, what Real Man wouldn’t want to read about a young woman having a relationship with the head doctor!  Spicy! As for Just One Evil Act, by Elizabeth George, we are informed that it is a “riveting tale of love, passion, and betrayal” concerning the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl named Hadiyyah. Riveting! Only a child-man could possibly fail to be fascinated by the prospect of such heart-pounding suspense!

Now, I read a lot more than most men or women do. A few of my favorite authors happen to be women. I think rather well of Murasaki Shikibu, Dorothy Sayers, Susan Cooper, Tanith Lee, and Teresa Edgerton. But the thing is, those female authors don’t write conventional romance crap, and if they do happen to exhibit the female tendency to insert some sort of a romantic angle into everything, at least they don’t permit it to dominate the story.

I now have zero – ZERO – interest in the vast majority of what presently passes for science fiction and mystery. Not because I dislike the genres, but because I dislike what the women who undeniably dominate the publishing industry insist on publishing as “science fiction” and “mystery”. And as a writer, I can say from direct personal influence that no matter how good the book is, or how significant its potential, if the book doesn’t “speak to me”, as one editor said, it’s simply not going to be published.

And guess what sort of books don’t speak to the sort of women who work in publishing? The very sort of books that men most prefer to read, which is books that reflect masculine perspectives and honor masculine virtues.

So who is to blame for the fact that most men have quit reading? The answer is obvious: whoever is responsible for refusing to publish the sort of books that men used to read.

Dark matter is still dark vapor

It proved impossible not to laugh at Bad Astronomy in light of the fact that actual scientific experiments are proving the science skeptic, and not the so-called astronomer, correct.  Back in 2008, the intrepid space expert wrote: 

“I happened to notice I was getting some traffic sent my way from Voxday,
an ultraconservative blogger who has a history of saying ridiculous
things — sometimes so ridiculous it’s indistinguishable from satire.
Unfortunately, of course, willful ignorance has quite an audience these
days, and just in case it’s not satire, I decided to reply….

“Your conclusions are way off the mark, for two reasons: you
misinterpreted/misunderstood what scientists did, and then you
misapplied it.

“First, 5% of the Universe is normal matter and energy. About 23% or
so is dark matter. While we don’t know precisely what it’s made of, its
existence has been conclusively proven, and it was using scientific
methods that proved it (its existence was speculated due to odd motions
of galaxies, its impact on observations predicted and then confirmed).”

Needless to say, I was unintimidated by the conventional “you just don’t understand sicence” response to which insecure scientists usually retreat when those they consider to be outside the secular priesthood dare to approach the sacred mysteries they reserve for themselves. How dare anyone point out the lack of evidence for their assumptions! After all, the consensus is settled and the matter is therefore conclusively proven!

At the time I wrote: “I do so enjoy seeing their unmitigated faith in scientific snapshots
landing the stupidly arrogant scientific faithful on their asses yet
again. What passes for science these days is beginning to sound like a
Monty Python skit:

“Dark Matter and Dark Energy…Dark Matter
and Dark Energy…. Our two explanations are Dark Matter and Dark
Energy…and Dark Vapor…. Our three explanations are Dark Matter, and
Dark Energy, and Dark Vapor…and an almost fanatical devotion to Karl
Popper…. Our four…no… Amongst our explanations are such elements
as Dark Matter, Dark Energy…. I’ll come in again.”

But it gets better, thanks to science:

A US team that claims to have built the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector has completed its first data run without seeing any sign of the stuff.

In a webcast presentation today at the Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, physicists working on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment said they had seen nothing statistically compelling in 110 days of data-taking. “We find absolutely no events consistent with any kind of dark matter,” says LUX co-spokesman Rick Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Physicists know from astronomical observations that 85% of the Universe’s matter is dark, making itself known only through its gravitational pull on conventional matter. Some think it may also engage in weak but detectable collisions with ordinary matter, and several direct detection experiments have reported tantalizing hints of these candidate dark matter particles, known as WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Gaitskell says that it is now overwhelmingly likely that earlier sightings were statistical fluctuations.

Now, with whose hypothesis are the results of this experiment consistent? The astronomer who knows, he just knows, that dark matter exists? Or the skeptic who, while open to the possibility that said material exists, understands the probability is that dark matter is nothing more than a mathematical fudge factor that allows the equations required by the current physics paradigm to balance properly?

Nor is this the first time the hunt for dark matter has failed since 2008. “In 2011, XENON-100 also saw no evidence for dark matter,
but had been criticized for not being sensitive enough to very low-mass
dark matter particles tentatively reported by other experiments. LUX
has five times the sensitivity of XENON-100 in the low-mass realm, which
should allay those concerns, says Gaitskell.”

Bad Astronomy has made a fundamental logical error that is increasingly common in scientistry, which is to adopt a scientific paradigm, accept a theory that is supported by mathematical models rather than by actual scientody, and then assume that the material evidence will eventually be found to support the model. But there are three potential problems there. If there are any flaws in the paradigm, the theory, or the model, then the evidence will not be found.

I don’t know if any of those three things are flawed, as I have neither the training nor the level of interest to delve into the matter in sufficient detail. But logic, combined with a knowledge of scientific history, is sufficient to conclude that if the predictive model repeatedly fails, there is, at the very least, a possibility that there is a mistake in the assumptions somewhere between the overall paradigm and the specific predictive model upon which the experiment is based.

Bad Astronomy’s unseemly scientific arrogance not only invites public humiliation, but indicates an inability to learn from the mistakes of past scientists. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that scientists were certain about the existence of luminiferous aether. It hardly seems impossible that one day, future Bad Astronomy types will attempt to disavow the notion that real scientists ever believed in anything so obviously nonsensical as “dark matter”.

A wiser professional cosmologist wrote the following on Slashdot:

“Any of this could be down to a modification of gravity. We know the
nature of gravity roughly up to the position of the Voyager craft —
call it 300AU to be generous. We are extrapolating that a thousand times
to get to galactic scales, a million times to get to cluster scales,
and a thousand million times to get to cosmological scales, all without
evidence. Of course, without a better theory to replace relativity, it’s
the best we can do, so we do it – but don’t try and claim that
instruments have detected that it is matter (they haven’t), nor that we
are wedded to particulate dark matter.”

UPDATE: A physicist bitch-slaps Phil Plait aka Bad Astronomy in the comments:

“Most scientists do not believe the current model of the universe or anything about it is proven.
That’s Plait’s opinion, and it’s frankly astonishing that anyone with a
PhD from a respectable university would make such a plainly stupid and
irresponsible statement. Plait is grossly misstating the situation, and
his statements do not represent the views of most particle
physicists / cosmologists, who willingly distinguish between that for
which there is ample evidence, that for which there are problems, and
that for which there is proof (nothing).”

Yeah, that’s what she said….

The nonexistent magic of geographical relocation

Republicans are beginning to wake up to the fact that Karl Rove was an inobservant fool and George Bush the Younger’s “Hispanics are natural conservatives” strategy was political suicide from the start:

Most of the millions of immigrants we have welcomed came from countries
where the only government they knew was one that made all decisions
about economic and social policy. The current level of legal immigration
to America adds thousands of people every day whose views and
experience are contrary to the conservative value of limited government.

The influx of these new voters will reduce or eliminate Republicans’
ability to offer an alternative to big government, increased government
spending, and favorite liberal policies such as Obamacare and gun
control. New voters will lean on our hard-pressed health care system and
overcrowded public schools to demand more government services….

An enormous body of survey research shows that large majorities of
recent immigrants, who are mostly Hispanic and Asian, hold liberal views
on most policy issues and therefore vote Democratic two-to-one.

Considering that the German, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants have never quite managed to master the historically unusual concepts of limited government and the sovereign rights of Englishmen, I’ve never understood the idea that Hispanics, Asians, and Africans, whose political traditions are even further from the American revolutionary concepts, could reasonably be expected to adopt them faithfully en masse.

When one considers that two of the three major political parties in Mexico are both members of the Socialist International, can it really be surprising to anyone that the 30 million+ Mexicans in the USA tend to lean left? Geographical location does not tend to change either ideology or political identities.