Category: Uncategorized

Spot the false assumption

CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent changes his mind about the evils of marijuana and its medical inutility

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

Assuming that the government does anything for scientific reasons, common sense reasons, or simply in the national interest is almost always going to turn out to be wrong.  Don’t do it.

Marijuana should be legalized. So should every other illegal recreational drug. The cost of banning them is simply far too high.  It is time to end Prohibition 2.0.

BUSTED, or, a minor margin of error

McRapey never stops stretching the facts in the interests of self-promotion.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 3:33 PM – 10 Aug 13
@gregpak I think if people like the content they will keep coming in regardless. I mean, my site gets 50K readers a day

I find this amusing because it is so perfectly in lack of character.  The fact is that John Scalzi’s site doesn’t get 50k readers a day.  It doesn’t even get 50k pageviews per day.  McRapey is exaggerating his daily readers by a factor between 10 and 25.  This is mathematically obvious because last year he was celebrating 8 million WordPress pageviews in 2012, which works out to 20,822 Google pageviews per day.  However, most sites run around 4 pageviews per reader, which means that, at most, McRapey’s site averages 5,205 readers per day. And if the level of engagement is higher than average there, as is the case here, then the actual number of average daily readers could be as low as 2,000.

By doubling his actual pageviews and then swapping “reader” for “pageview”, McRapey tries to make his site look considerably more popular and influential than it is. This sort of bait-and-switch is typical for the Left and it isn’t new for McRapey.  I recall that the very first time he came to my attention, he was bragging about his vast knowledge of science fiction based, in part, on “Four science fiction novels sold” at a time when he only had one “conventionally published”. I correctly had him pegged for a bullshit artist from the very start.

If I were to exaggerate on a similar scale, I could claim 75k readers a day for my sites.  But I don’t.  Because there aren’t.

UPDATE: It turns out this isn’t the first time McRapey has lied about his blog traffic.  In this 2012 tweet, he even makes it clear that his 50k claim refers only to average daily blog readers, not pageviews or one-time maximums, and it is a claim that happens to be completely, utterly, and provably false.

John Scalzi @scalzi 6:20 AM – 4 Dec 12
Hey, authors of non-traditionally published books! Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers TODAY: http://bit.ly/TzNsdl

I invite McRapey to come clean about his ludicrous exaggerations and do what I and many other honest bloggers do.  Just put up a link that allows your readers to see exactly what your real daily readers are and stop blatantly lying about how many of them there are.

UPDATE II: McRapey wrote: “Bear in mind that I don’t generally lie for the sake of lying. That’s really stupid, and I’m not that
good of a liar. Most things aren’t worth lying about, and as a rule I
do try to live my life in a manner so that lying isn’t something I have
to do a lot of.”

One has to admire the calculated preparatory spin.  McRapey doesn’t lie for the sake of lying, he lies whenever he thinks it suits his interests and he can get away with it. Scalzi lies frequently and he lies shamelessly.  He often lies about very stupid things. The man is a gifted self-promoter, and one of the things that makes him so good at self-promotion is his complete lack of honesty or integrity.

And that is probably what lies at the heart of our contempt for each other.

Facts about immigration

Zerohedge lists 19 facts about immigration, both legal and illegal.  The emphasis is on the “illegal”, but conservative sensitivities notwithstanding, the problems of immigration do not hinge upon the legal or illegal status of the immigrant.  These are the five I considered most important:

#1 57 percent of all households that are led by an immigrant (legal or illegal) are enrolled in at least one welfare program.

#4 The Department of Homeland Security says that it has lost track of a million people that have entered this country but that appear never to have left.

#9 It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent
of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total
cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.

#17 According to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006.  By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.

#19 It is being projected that the Senate immigration bill will bring 33 million more people to the United States over the next decade.

And keep in mind these are only some of the known costs of immigration, while most of the supposed benefits resulting from this free movement of labor are, in fact, also detrimental to the interests of most American citizens. 

Bryan Caplan and the Open Borders movement

I find it remarkable that the image below is what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks passes for a pro-immigration image.
In the meantime, the quasi-libertarian economist Bryan Caplan is demonstrating that he can’t follow the basic logic of domestic free trade or understand the consequences of the free movement of international labor as the Open Borders movement searches for a logo.  Steve Sailer has compiled a number of them that are nearly as bad as the Chamber of Commerce’s entry.

“The Open Borders movement seeks a symbol that embodies the spirit of
free migration. To achieve that goal, we are sponsoring a logo contest.
The winner of this contest will get $200 and their design will become
the official logo of the Open Borders web site.”

Lacking any graphic talent, I shall refrain from attempting to create one myself, although I would certainly encourage the Dread Ilk to do so if anyone is so inclined.  Instead, I would invite Mr. Caplan to attempt to rebut my argument that an Open Borders regime will force the international emigration of more than 40 percent of Americans before they turn 35.  I should also like to see him address the fact that this forced economic migration is desired by influential statists specifically in order to “undermine the “homogeneity of its member states”.

It is very important to understand that Open Borders movement seeks nothing less than the destruction of the nation-state in the name of the global economy.  This extreme Free Trade doctrine necessarily requires the end of the Jewish state of Israel, the end of the U.S. Constitution, and the demolition of the chief structural obstacle to global dictatorship. Open Borders and the Free Trade argument can be best understood as the European Common Market scheme writ large; it is the economic bait for global political integration.

The current immigration reform bill is the completion of the American national suicide that began with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and was proposed by the grandson of Jewish immigrants, sponsored by the grandson of Irish immigrants, and publicly championed by another grandson of Irish immigrants.  Thus demonstrating that even when they are superficially integrated, second- and third-generation immigrants tend to act against the interests of the nations their parents and grandparents invaded.

A lethally unsafe vaccine

Clinical equipoise notwithstanding, it should be interesting to see the anti-science vaccine extremists attempting to claim that “the lead researcher in the development of the human papilloma virus vaccines” doesn’t know anything about science or vaccines due to her expressed opinion concerning the risk of adverse side effects from the vaccine:

All trials of the vaccines were done on children aged 15 and above, despite them currently being marketed for 9-year-olds. So far, 15,037 girls have reported adverse side effects from Gardasil alone to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (V.A.E.R.S.), and this number only reflects parents who underwent the hurdles required for reporting adverse reactions.
At the time of writing, 44 girls are officially known to have died from these vaccines. The reported side effects include Guillian Barré Syndrome (paralysis lasting for years, or permanently — sometimes eventually causing suffocation), lupus, seizures, blood clots, and brain inflammation. Parents are usually not made aware of these risks.

44 dead.  Notice how the trials were completely unsuitable for proving the safety of the vaccine for the age of the girls to whom it is being administered.

Vaccines are not magic, like everything else, they need to be subjected to a basic risk/reward analysis.  But the scientific community has not only failed to due its duty to provide the public with the necessary information to perform this analysis, it has clearly failed to inform the public of the risks even when they were known, and known to be potentially fatal.

Some vaccines are necessary for certain people at certain times.  Gardasil and Cervarix are not, and no parent with a teenage daughter should permit her to receive them.

The unexpected winners in the cultural war

It’s not the Moral Majority. It’s not the godless progressives. It’s not even the Rainbow Coalition.

It’s the Hispanics:

This summer, there’s a new No. 1 among television viewers aged 18 to 49:
For the fourth week in a row, the Spanish-language network Univision
has won the primetime ratings contest for this coveted demographic, as
well as the 18 to 34 cohort. It’s Univision’s first top finish in a
sweeps month; the network previously beat NBC to come in fourth in the
critical February sweeps period.

One thing that has become obvious to me about the monoracial is that many of them simply cannot conceive of the notion that the genuinely multiracial might not look on every aspect of their own racial heritages with equal favor.  Just as constant long-term exposure to vibrancy tends to produce the most virulent racists, close and personal experience with family cultures tends to produce opinions about those cultures that are extremely well-informed, if not necessarily viewed with approval by those who are considerably less informed on the matter.

In other words, if there is a channel that is going to broadcast “Ow My Balls”, Univision is a considerably more likely candidate than PBS.

Rules of Writing II

2. Thou shalt know how it ends

This may seem obvious, but based on numerous books I have read, knowing the ending is something that far too few writers do before they initially set their metaphorical pen to paper.

There are three types of novelists. The first is the Outliner. These are highly organized writers who are able to carefully plan out how the book will proceed and more or less stick to their plan.  This is probably the ideal way to go about writing novels, but it’s also extremely difficult if you are insufficiently organized.  Outliners tend to write books that are tightly plotted, idea-driven, complex, and formulaic. Due to the complexity and scope of A Throne of Bones, most people assume that I am an Outliner, but as it happens, I am not. JK Rowling is one example of an outliner and I suspect most writers of murder mystery series are based on the predictable sequence of events in many murder mysteries.

The second type of novelist is the Explorer.  Most authors are Explorers and not only don’t have an outline to hand, they often have no idea what they’re going to write about when they sit down and stare at the blank page. They tend to follow the story where it takes them rather than forcing the story into preconceived directions. Explorers tend to write books that start well and finish badly, (or vice-versa), that are character-driven, dialogue-heavy, and of varying quality from book to book. I am an Explorer; of all the various characters who died in ATOB, there were only two characters whose deaths were planned and one of them was dictated by the historical event upon which the situation was based.

The third type of novelist is the Autobiographer. This is the author who is the protagonist of his every book.  They are generally uninterested in anything that isn’t themselves; if one looks closely enough, one can always see the image of the author underneath all of the major characters. If their lives or personalities are sufficiently interesting, Autobiographers may have one or two very good books in them, after which point they run out of material as their books are experience-driven rather than plot- or idea-driven. Jay McInerney is the foremost example of an Autobiographer; Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace are more recent examples.  I also suspect that McRapey is an Autobiographer, which explains why his novels are more akin to professional fan fiction than original fiction.

But regardless of what type of novelist you are, it is always vital to know exactly how the book ends.  When I started writing ATOB, I knew precisely three things: the prologue, the conflict between the general and his young tribune, and the long retreat north.  But because I knew the beginning and the end, I had the necessary anchor points to prevent the story from wandering aimlessly adrift.

In the absence of an outline, knowing the end helps pace the story and forces it to keep moving forward. This can be done well or it can be done poorly, but one way or another, it will be done.  We have all read authors who wait too long to begin the descent into the end and wind up accelerating the story and crashing the book in the last two or three chapters, but even these negative examples are better than books that simply seem to stop without any warning or reason.  Knowing the end won’t only make the ending better, but it will help make everything in between the beginning and the end much more coherent.

Rules of Writing I: Thou shalt know thy world

Science is fiction

It is a little ironic that just as science fiction authors have managed to excise most of the science from science fiction, scientists are transforming professional peer-reviewed published science into science fiction:

A recently published ASAP article in the journal Organometallics is sure to raise some eyebrows in the chemical community. While the paper itself is a straightforward study of palladium and platinum bis-sulfoxide complexes, page 12 of the corresponding Supporting Information file contains what appears to be an editorial note that was inadvertently left in the published document:

    “Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…”

This statement goes beyond a simple embarrassing failure to properly edit the manuscript, as it appears the first author is being instructed to fabricate data. Elemental analyses would be very easy to fabricate, and long-time readers of this blog will recall how fake elemental analyses were pivotal to Bengu Sezen’s campaign of fraud in the work she published from 2002 to 2005 out of Dalibor Sames’ lab at Columbia.

One commenter notes: “It should also be noted that this made it through at least three reviewers and an editor.”  Of course, it’s easy to justify the invented compound. Clinical equipoise.  In fact, that’s now my go-to excuse for everything.  If Spacebunny asks me why I didn’t take the trash out on Trash Day, I just shrug and say, “hey, baby, clinical equipoise.” 

Hugo Danger’s epic meltdown

It is certainly a doozy.  A brief sample of hits from Hugo’s Great Manic Confession follows.  TL;DR: We were right.  The leading male feminist was a complete fraud.

I am handing over my password to a trusted friend shortly.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 15h

Well, that was a manic episode.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

I’m sorry that I kept mocking socially awkward men as creeps as a way of making myself look better.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

Please. After the sexting and the fraudulence and the sheer ugly debasedness of it all I’m finished.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

People are tweeting me saying I’m hurting myself more by doing this. How? You think I had a chance at a comeback?
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

I did promote others but I secretly wanted to be THE male feminist
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 18h

To everyone at the Good Men Project I am so sorry
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

Or find a better way of doing it because I did deserve it. I was a shitty writer and I was a fraud and I did try to kill my ex
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So you should know that you were RIGHT! This man is not well.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

The point is simple and clear and sane. I have been a self-aggrandizing fraud from day one. @studentactivism will tell you
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So yes, I sexted with a hooker. Yes, I wanted to have my students watch me screw James Deen.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I loved being the most notorious bad boy male feminist out there
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

But I was just craving attention.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I’m a monstrous hypocrite.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

…that I was sleeping with a 23 year-old. And sexting a 27 year-old. Not my students at least.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I cheated on my wife and pretended to be reformed. I wrote an article in the Atlantic condemning age-disparate relationships the same week
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

My friends who defended me I’m so sorry. You did all that work for nothing. The critics were right, they could see it.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I am so so sorry that I let myself be like this. But I wanted atttention so f-ing bad. This was all about attention.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

And yes, I networked like a motherfucker to get promoted.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I’ll be fine, and I’ll dump in some tranquilizers in a sec. But let the truth come out. The critics were right.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I loved the attention more and I was fucking awesome at getting it.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I read one book of Kimmel’s and made myself an expert on men and masculinity.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

But there was no there there.
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I then built a career as a well-known online male feminist on fraudulent pretenses. My mania let me talk a good game
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

So the real story you all missed is that I talked my way into teaching women’s studies on the basis of 2 undergrad courses only
Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 19h

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to seeing how McRapey is going to top this bold move by Hugo Danger.  Let’s face it, a mere ballgown isn’t going to do it.

Publishers terrified by Amazon’s “price war”

This gentleman from Melville House doesn’t appear too happy about the “breaking news” of what he describes as Amazon declaring war on the book industry.  He quotes an excerpt from an industry publication:

Yesterday Amazon.com quietly began discounting many bestselling
hardcover titles between 50% and 65%, levels we’ve never seen in the
history of Amazon or in the bricks-and-mortar price wars of the past.
The books are from a range of major publishers and include, for example,
Inferno by Dan Brown, which has a list price of $29.95 but is available on Amazon for $11.65, a 61% discount; And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, listed for $28.95, offered at $12.04, a 58% discount; Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, listed at $24.95, available for $9.09, a 64% discount; and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, listed at $17.99, available for $6.55, 64% off. A notable exception is The Cuckoo’s Calling by J.K. Rowling, using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which is discounted 42%.
The changes appear largely to be in response to an Overstock.com
campaign launched this week to be 10% lower than Amazon’s on “the
roughly 360,000 books sold on both Overstock.com and Amazon.com,”
according to Internet Retailer. Overstock has said the anti-Amazon campaign will last indefinitely although its site says “one week only.”

The
discounts are, of course, far higher than the usual 40%-50% range
offered by Amazon, warehouse clubs and other discounters–including
Overstock–and are more typical for remainders than frontlist
hardcovers.

Why do the professional publishers care if Amazon starts offering its bestselling books at cost, just like many brick-and-mortar bookstores do?  After all, they get paid the same no matter what price the book is sold at retail.  The reason is that this move should suffice to kill off the brick-and-mortar stores, the sales to whom are the last remaining advantage of the professional publishers over the independent and self-publishers.

Look at The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed.  Right now, its Kindle ranking is about 30,000 and it has 127 reviews with an average rating of 4.2 stars.  Now compare it to A Throne of Bones, which has a current Kindle ranking of 52,000, 109 reviews and an average rating of 4.3 stars.  That 52k is in the middle of its customary range, as it bounces between 30k and 100k.

What that means is despite Ahmed’s book being published by DAW, being nominated for two major awards, and being pushed heavily by its publisher, it doesn’t sell much better on Amazon than my independently published book does.  It has almost certainly sold 10x more books total than mine has, but that is through the brick-and-mortar stores where it is distributed and mine is not.

Take those stores away, and suddenly we find ourselves in the grand experiment of “did the book buyer seek or discover the books he bought at the book store?”  It may be that Amazon will capture all the lost brick-and-mortar sales and they will be perfectly distributed among publishers and authors online as they were before.  But it usually doesn’t work that way.

I believe that the closure of the brick-and-mortar stores, the rate of which will increase as time goes on, is going to benefit writers with a strong online presence as well as authors who are popular with Twitter celebrities.  It is going to badly hurt the remaining midlist writers and new writers who are dependent upon having their books pushed upon unsuspecting readers by their publishers.

And that is what scares the publishers to death. The combination of declining ebook profit margins and paper book sales is going to put many, if not most of them, out of the fiction business.  Technical, academic, and trade publishing will survive, but conventional genre publishing will not.

Especially not when Amazon starts offering better royalties to established writers as an incentive to drop their existing publishers and go directly with Amazon.  Just as the traditional publishers snap up successful self-publishers, Amazon can skim off the most successful writers from the publishers.  It’s a no-win game for the traditional publishers, and it’s not going to take more than three or four years for them to figure out that even if they do everything right and make all the correct calls, they cannot win.

If you’re a writer, don’t waste your time trying to be the last rat to board the sinking ships.  Forget the idea of “book contracts” and invest your time and money into improving your self-publishing.  That’s the world in which you’re going to be competing soon one way or another, so you may as well get accustomed to it now.