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Tom Clancy’s legacy

Now, this is rather cool. Number two and Number three of the writers named as the Top 10 Living Authors to cary on Tom Clancy’s legacy of military technothriller happen to be our own Standout Authors Tom Kratman and Larry Corriea:

(3) In the world of Larry Correia,
there are werewolves, vampires, and monsters of every shape and size.
Why on Earth would Correia’s writing rank so high on a list about
spiritual successors to Tom Clancy? The reason is that in Correia’s
novels (especially the Monster Hunters series), there is an accuracy
demanded in everything that has a human element. The places are real.
The guns down to the make, model, and ammunition are real. If there ever
was a Zombie Apocalypse,
the novels of Larry Correia should be required reading as a field
guide. It is that type of accuracy in the real world leading to a
confrontation with a fantastic situation that are really the best part
of the Tom Clancy experience in novels. In Clancy’s work, there may not
necessarily be a renegade sub, but the information about the sub had
absolutely better be technically correct. In that aspect, Correia
absolutely gets the detail right.

(2) Tom Kratman was a
native of Massachusetts. Kratman served with the 101st Airborne
division in Panama. Kratman also served with the 5th Special Forces
group during the Iraq War. Kratman is also a lawyer
in addition to being a militaristic science fiction writer. Kratman
often writes in a type of futuristic universe of war based on real
principles. If Tom Kratman had written about the Space Marines in the
movie Aliens,
he would have probably written a training manual and put the actors
through basic training. Kratman will often use futuristic settings to
address issues of the day. The difference is that Kratman will often use
it to espouse conservative views such as in his Polseen War sidestories
of the Legacy of Aldenata series by John Ringo. Try to think of Tom
Kratman as kind of an anti-Gene Roddenberry. If Tom Clancy had been born
in about 200 years, he would be Tom Kratman.

  Big shoes? Perhaps. But the feet are pretty big too.

Fight cancer, feel up a stranger

As the NFL ceaselessly works to remind us, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  So, in the spirit of the month, I’d like to encourage everyone, male or female, to fight breast cancer the next time you are in line at the supermarket or the mall behind a woman.

Just reach out with both hands and give the woman in front of you a thorough breast exam. You never know, you just might save a life! And while she might seem a little surprised at first, show her your pink ribbon and warn her about the dangers of that terrible, terrible disease. It’s all about awareness, after all.

She’ll probably be grateful. And even if she isn’t, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing and raised her awareness. It is science.

“Women who like to have their breasts squeezed will now possibly gain a
health benefit, according to new research released last week. According to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley
and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, putting mechanical force
on malignant breast cells can reverse their irregular growth process and
put them back on track for a normal growth pattern.”

The meltdown proceedeth

Interesting. I would have thought that a sexually confused male feminist with mental health issues would have to murder and devour a woman in his classroom before facing disciplinary action:

Pasadena City College has asked Hugo Schwyzer, professor of women’s studies and so-called “Internet feminist,” to resign or face disciplinary action, the Pasadena Star News reported. The request comes on the heels of Schwyzer’s arrest last week for suspicion of driving under the influence following an accident that left a woman injured. The professor told the Star News he would not resign until January, when he is scheduled to begin receiving his disability retirement benefits.

I had no idea Hugo Danger had been arrested. It’s almost as hard to stay current with his various issues as it is with the latest version of McRapey’s site traffic claims.

“Peer review is a joke”

The non-author of a sting paper peer-reviewed and published by Science points out that the open access sting published by Science is conclusive proof that so-called peer review is the problem, not open access publication:

Although it comes as no surprise to anyone who is bombarded every day by solicitations from new “American” journals of such-and-such seeking papers and offering editorial positions to anyone with an email account, the formal exposure of hucksters out there looking to make a quick buck off of scientists’ desires to get their work published is valuable. It is unacceptable that there are publishers – several owned by big players in the subscription publishing world – who claim that they are carrying out peer review, and charging for it, but no doing it.

But it’s nuts to construe this as a problem unique to open access publishing, if for no other reason than the study, didn’t do the control of submitting the same paper to subscription-based publishers (UPDATE: The author, Bohannon emailed to say that, while his original intention was to look at all journals, practical constraints limited him to OA journals, and that Science played no role in this decision). We obviously don’t know what subscription journals would have done with this paper, but there is every reason to believe that a large number of them would also have accepted the paper (it has many features in common with the arsenic DNA paper afterall). Like OA journals, a lot of subscription-based journals have businesses based on accepting lots of papers with little regard to their importance or even validity. When Elsevier and other big commercial publishers pitch their “big deal”, the main thing they push is the number of papers they have in their collection. And one look at many of their journals shows that they also will accept almost anything.

None of this will stop anti-open access campaigners  (hello Scholarly Kitchen) from spinning this as a repudiation for enabling fraud. But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. If a nakedly bogus paper is able to get through journals that actually peer reviewed it, think about how many legitimate, but deeply flawed, papers must also get through. Any scientist can quickly point to dozens of papers – including, and perhaps especially, in high impact journals – that are deeply, deeply flawed – the arsenic DNA story is one of many recent examples. As you probably know there has been a lot of smoke lately about the “reproducibility” problem in biomedical science, in which people have found that a majority of published papers report facts that turn out not to be true. This all adds up to showing that peer review simply doesn’t work.

He’s referring to John Bohannan’s article “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?“, in which the author submitted an obviously fake paper describing the anticancer properties of a chemical extracted from a lichen that was nominally written by Ocorrafoo Cobange, a fictional biologist at the nonexistent Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, that was accepted by 157 open access journals and rejected by only 98. As Slashdot describes it: “The article reveals a ‘Wild West’ landscape that’s emerging in academic publishing, where journals and their editorial staffs aren’t necessarily who or what they claim to be.”

This sting highlights the vital difference between scientody and the scientistry which is, most of the time, a fraudulent parody of what non-scientists believe science to be. Not only are scientists mere men rather than the white-coated demigods purely devoted to science they like to believe themselves to be, but due to the extraordinarily perverse incentive system to which they are subject, they are provably less honest in their occupations than the average individual.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that you cannot take intelligent design seriously because it isn’t peer reviewed or that you can soon expect to cook pasta in the Atlantic because the scientific consensus is 95 percent certain that Man is causing the oceans to boil. The fact is that scientistry has become increasingly disconnected from scientody, peer review is a charade, most published science papers are not reproducible, and what passes for science is simply not what you probably believe it to be.

The irony is that the Science article is, in itself, bad scientody. Bohannan did not utilize a control group; he did not submit the fake paper to a single conventional subscription journal. He also did not send it to the majority of open access journals on the grounds that they do not require article processing charges.

Science not only is not the sole arbiter of truth, the assertions of scientists shouldn’t even be taken seriously until the “science” is transformed into something that is actually reliable, which is to say, engineering.

To scare the Left

I love that the name of this painting is STAND YOUR GROUND.  It represents everything that the Left is against: Freedom, America, Guns, Whites, Men, Masculine Strength, Morality, and Self-Defense. To say nothing of Art that isn’t government-funded, anti-traditional, and readily confused with a child’s fingerpainting.

I should like to see what the artist could do with the subject MOLON LABE. It appears the Third Revolutionaries may have their own Jacques-Louis David.

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

Enforcing Obamacare

It never occurred to me to imagine that the federal government
wouldn’t enforce its fines for failure to engage in required economic
activity with its usual bag of tricks, including seizing bank accounts and placing property liens:

If true, the implementation of Obamacare is going to be a whole lot more draconian than Americans have been led to believe. 

“I actually made it through this morning at 8:00 A.M. I
have a preexisting condition (Type 1 Diabetes) and my income base was
45K-55K annually I chose tier 2 “Silver Plan” and my monthly premiums
came out to $597.00 with $13,988 yearly deductible!!! There is NO
POSSIBLE way that I can afford this so I “opt-out” and chose to continue
along with no insurance.

“I received an email tonight at 5:00 P.M. informing me
that my fine would be $4,037 and could be attached to my yearly income
tax return. Then you make it to the “REPERCUSSIONS PORTION” for
“non-payment” of yearly fine. First, your drivers license will be
suspended until paid, and if you go 24 consecutive months with
“Non-Payment” and you happen to be a home owner, you will have a federal
tax lien placed on your home. You can agree to give your bank
information so that they can easy “Automatically withdraw” your
“penalties” weekly, bi-weekly or monthly! This by no means is “Free” or
even “Affordable.””

The federal government has consistently denied that any
fines pertaining to Obamacare non-compliance could be seized from bank
accounts, despite reports last year that the IRS had hired 16,500 new agents to harass citizens who attempt to evade the new law.

The
system is breaking down, and it appears to be breaking down
increasingly fast. Once people stop paying their Obamacare fines, how
long will it be before they stop paying other taxes? And using the
banking system as an enforcement device for the sake of compliance is
more likely to break the banking system than it is to allow this
expansion of the tax system to function as envisioned.

Au contraire, mon ami

I think Captain Capitalism read a bit too much into yesterday’s post in concluding the college credentialists got me:

A well written and charty-goodness post, but he still considers the education/college degree gap a “real” gap. There are two brief points I shall make as I’m trying to knock out a chapter per 4 days of my book:

1.  Women earn the majority of EASY DEGREES.  When it comes to engineering and anything that requires significant math men beat them at a ratio of 4:1. 
When it comes to Masters in Farting Unicorns and Doctorates in Feelings
with Minors in Oprah, yes, women dominate.  But for the stuff that
matters in the world, men by far outcompete women.

2.  Women are NOT going to be ahead in the world for this.  It is NOT a
good thing for women that they are earning the majority of degrees
because they are buying into a bubble.  It’s like having women
purchasing 70% of the housing in early 2007 and citing that as an
example of some kind of performance gap.

The college degree gap is real. The fact that the degrees are worthless is irrelevant. Captain Capitalism appears to have forgotten that I am not a credentialist, and moreover, I was one of the earliest commentators to point out the increasing irrelevance of the college degree. Consider what I wrote on the subject in 2004:

“The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago.
Beginning in the ’60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual
development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds
of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured
faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the
devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of
sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as
absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what’s really
going on in the world.”

I wrote a few more columns on the subject, and in the 2012 WND column entitled “Education is not an investment“, I pointed out five flaws in the various “return-on-investment” calculations used to justify college degrees, such as the failure to take student loan debt into account.

“The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501;
however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010
college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And
since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating
students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8
percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that
seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average
ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan
interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt
is $247,118.”

Ironically, one could build a solid case for a young man being better off financially by lending his $25,000 college fund to college students while going off and working instead of getting a degree, so long as he is able to earn more than $4,680 per year for the next 30 years in addition to collecting his federally guaranteed debt-tribute.

What Captain Capitalism failed to realize is that I don’t see the growing preponderance of women in higher education as evidence that women are going to run the world. To the contrary, I see it as evidence that higher education is in the late stages of collapse. Because women ruin everything. The final stage will be reached when Title IX is successfully applied to the STEM degrees, which is already federal law, and math and the hard sciences are sufficiently dumbed down to permit women to receive what is determined to be an equitable number of those degrees.

By that point, men will have likely created alternative systems to the university credentials that are as unpalatable to women as the universities once were, and successful businesses will be increasingly prone to utilize those systems. Some sort of online achievement-based system like those popular in the IT world would appear to be the likely candidate, especially as the availability of online degrees from prestigious institutions continues to increase. Once 50,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese are graduating with degrees from Harvard, its social cachet will plummet.

To wereseals and beyond

I give you the obvious frontrunner for the 2014 Hugo Award!

Dinosaur erotica looks set to be the latest niche craze in the world of sexy fiction as a trio of books on the topic is released to buy for the Kindle. The naughty novels, with titles such as Running From The Raptor and Taken by the T-Rex focus on the fantasy of helpless young women being attacked and seduced by dinosaurs.

The dinosaur porn imagines a world where humans and dinosaurs existed together. For the tale of In the Velociraptor’s Nest the protagonist Azog is a cavewoman, under appreciated in her tribe.

The synopsis says: ‘The cavemen treat her like a piece a meat. Azog cannot resist unless she proves herself as a hunter. When she goes out in search of fresh meat, she discovers a clutch of baby velociraptors and decides to kill them and triumphantly bring them back to her tribe. That is, until their father shows up and blocks Azog’s way out of the cave. Azog must use all of her womanly wiles to get out of the cave, which includes doing things she had never dreamed of.’

You might think Taken by the T-Rex is unlikely to catch on, let alone win awards. And then, it occurs to you that these are the sort of people who gave an award to McRapey for Redshirts.

Equality is the reason you can’t have good books.

Red Storm Setting

Tom Clancy has died. The best-selling author died in a Baltimore hospital on Tuesday night at the age of 66, according to his publisher.

Sic transit gloria mundi. I wasn’t a huge Clancy fan; I started reading his books with The Hunt for Red October until he lost me with Clear and Present Danger, but I still remember reading Red Storm Rising on the way back to my sophomore year of college and not going out that first night back because I absolutely had to finish the book first.

And I appreciated the little joke that he put in The Sum of All Fears with the two teams in the Super Bowl being the Denver Broncos and the Minnesota Vikings. It doesn’t work so well post Super Bowl XXXII, but it is still pretty funny. Somebody just HAS to win, right? Yeah, not so much.