Category: Uncategorized

The CEOs vanish

It’s fascinating to see how many top corporate executives are suddenly deciding to retire for absolutely no reason at all:

Multiple CEOs stepped town today and this week: Disney, MasterCard, L Brands, Salesforce, Uber Eats, HULU, MGM, IBM, LinkedIn, Match.com.

And Jeff Bezos’s private jet landed in New Zealand one week ago.

A $102m private jet owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has landed in Wellington tonight. The Gulfstream G650ER jet touched down in the capital tonight, but it remains unclear if the richest man in the world was aboard. 

Curiouser and curiouser….

Scientistry is fake science

Even without taking the reproducibility crisis into account, it is becoming readily apparent that “published, peer-reviewed science” is not the ultimate arbiter of the truth. Or even a moderately reliable proxy for it. From a 2019 paper published in Science and Engineering Ethics called “Assessing and Raising Concerns About Duplicate Publication, Authorship Transgressions and Data Errors in a Body of Preclinical Research”:

Authorship transgressions, duplicate data reporting and reporting/data errors compromise the integrity of biomedical publications. Using a standardized template, we raised concerns with journals about each of these characteristics in 33 pairs of publications originating from 15 preclinical (animal) trials reported by a group of researchers. The outcomes of interest were journal responses, including time to acknowledgement of concerns, time to decision, content of decision letter, and disposition of publications at 1 year. Authorship transgressions afected 27/36 (75{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) publications. The median proportion of duplicate data within pairs of publications was 45{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} (interquartile range 29–57). Data/reporting discrepancies [median 3 (1–5)] were present in 28/33 (85{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) pairs. Journals acknowledged receipt of concerns for 53{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} and 94{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of publications by 1 month and 9 months, respectively.

After 1 year, journals had communicated decisions for 16/36 (44{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) publications. None of the decision letters specifically addressed each of the concerns raised. Decisions were no action, correction and retraction for 9, 3 and 4 publications, respectively: the amounts of duplicate data reporting and data/reporting discrepancies were similar irrespective of journal decision. Authorship transgressions affected 6/9 (67{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) publications for which no action was decided. Journal responses to concerns about duplicate publication, authorship transgressions, and data/reporting discrepancies were slow, opaque and inconsistent.

Translation: you know that “science is self-correcting” idea? It’s completely and utterly false. It’s nothing more than propaganda for scientistry.

When a pandemic isn’t a pandemic

It’s when the globalists are modifying the meaning of a clearly defined term in order to protect their financial interests:

A little known specialized bond created in 2017 by the World Bank may hold the answer as to why U.S. and global health authorities have declined to label the global spread of the novel coronavirus a “pandemic.” Those bonds, now often referred to as “pandemic bonds,” were ostensibly intended to transfer the risk of potential pandemics in low-income nations to financial markets.

Yet, in light of the growing coronavirus outbreak, the investors who purchased those products could lose millions if global health authorities were to use that label in relation to the surge in global coronavirus cases.

On Tuesday, federal health officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they are preparing for a “potential pandemic” of the novel coronavirus that first appeared in China late last year. The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that an estimated 80,000 worldwide have contracted the disease, most of them in China, while more than 2,700 have died.

However, some have argued that the CDC’s concerns about a likely pandemic have come too late and that action should have been taken much earlier. For instance, in early February, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, had told the New York Times that the novel coronavirus is “very, very transmissible, and it almost certainly is going to be a pandemic,” while former CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden had echoed those concerns at the time, stating that it is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained.”

Despite those warnings, among many others, the CDC waited to announce its concerns that the virus could spread throughout the United States. Their Tuesday announcement riled markets, wiping out $1.7 trillion in stock market value in just two days. The CDC’s warning has reportedly angered President Trump, who accused the agency of needlessly spooking financial markets.

Notably, WHO officials have taken an even more cautious approach than the CDC in their recent comments, stating that it is still “too early” to declare the coronavirus outbreak a “pandemic” while also asserting that “it is time to do everything you would do in preparing for a pandemic.”

The refusal to label the outbreak a pandemic is odd, since it refers to an epidemic or actively spreading disease that affects two or more regions worldwide. This currently describes the geographical spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus, which has now resulted in significant clusters of cases far from China, namely in Italy and Iran. Countries closer to China, like South Korea, have also recently experienced an explosion in novel coronavirus infections.

Given that the disease is actively spreading in at least FOUR different regions, the term “pandemic” is obviously the correct one. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly lethal pandemic, fortunately, but the term is entirely appropriate at this juncture.

Another reason to ignore PragerU

Neither Dennis Prager nor his “U” understand U.S. law:

YouTube may have more than a billion users, but it’s not a public forum run by the government and therefore its decision to moderate content isn’t a violation of the First Amendment, an appellate court has ruled.

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager sued Google in 2017, claiming that his conservative PragerU videos weren’t getting the same treatment as liberal ones, like Real Time with Bill Maher clips, in violation of the First Amendment. A California federal judge dismissed the complaint in March 2018 on the grounds that YouTube isn’t a public forum run by a state actor and can regulate videos uploaded to the site as it sees fit.

On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision and rejected PragerU’s contention that the site has become a digital-era public forum and its power to moderate content is a threat to fair dissemination of conservative viewpoints on public issues.

“Using private property as a forum for public discourse is nothing new,” writes Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown. “Long before the internet, people posted announcements on neighborhood bulletin boards, debated weighty issues in coffee houses, and shouted each other down in community theaters.”

While those methods seem “quaint” compared to the 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each day, the underlying issues don’t change.

“Despite YouTube’s ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment,” writes McKeown, adding that both the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent present “insurmountable barriers” to PragerU’s argument.

“Just last year, the Court held that ‘merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints,’” writes McKeown. “The internet does not alter this state action requirement of the First Amendment.”

The fact that there are many sound legal challenges to the tech giants doesn’t mean that it is a good idea to rely upon ridiculous First Amendment-based challenges to them. Indeed, these arguments are so obviously retarded that they almost appear designed to fail in order to demoralize anyone tempted to stand against the corpocracy.

And it’s not a surprise that an inversive like Prager would rely upon attempting to subvert the definition of “public forum” in order to make his failed case.

Go for it, god-emperor!

I will be having a News Conference at the White House, on this subject, today at 6:00 P.M. CDC representatives, and others, will be there. Thank you!
– Donald J. Trump

I don’t think the god-emperor will be declaring martial law just yet. But we can hope!

The conspiracy theorists are right again

As usual, the Official Story is admitted to be false, and promptly forgotten:

We found it fascinating that none other than China’s nationalist propaganda mouthpiece, the Global Times, published a report overnight which dramatically changes the narrative, namely that a “New Chinese study indicates novel coronavirus did not originate in Huanan seafood market.”

According to the brand new study by Chinese researchers published on Feb 21,  the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. Of course, we already knew that, but what is critical is that until now, Beijing was adamant in sticking to the official narrative that it was the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan where the disease emerged, despite not providing any information on what animal was the vector, or who was patient zero.

However, now that this narrative has been officially questioned and challenged in a media outlet of the communist party, it is safe to say that the theory of the Huanan food market being the source of the pandemic, is officially dead.

I haven’t really been paying attention, but is the Wuhan Institute Of Virology now the official source of the outbreak or is everyone just assuming that it will eventually be accepted as the official source? The most important thing to remember about conspiracy theorists is that they are a) almost always correct about what they believe did NOT happen and b) almost always incorrect about what they believe actually happened instead.

Besides, we already know the real culprit.

SocialGalactic invites round 2

All the 6k+ invitations to SocialGalactic that were not either accepted or rejected are being sent out again today and tomorrow. If you still haven’t received one by the end of day tomorrow, please do not let us know or complain about this, as we are not responsible for managing your inbox or teaching you about the existence of your Spam, Junk, Social, and Promotions folders, just to name four places that people “who were not sent invites” have belatedly discovered their invitations. If you’re searching your inbox for the invite, look for “sg@”.

Please note that after tomorrow, sending me an email about how you haven’t received an invitation to SG2 will only result in your email going onto my black list and rendering it impossible for you to email me in the future.

Do not confuse customer support with education.

They should totally run the country

The US electorate just got a good look at what the Democrats have to offer them:

Democratic presidential candidates got into a series of angry and personal exchanges at Tuesday night’s debate in Charleston – with Bernie Sanders attacking Mike Bloomberg for being a billionaire, Bloomberg labeling Sanders as Vladimir Putin’s favorite and a trio of candidates blasting Bloomberg for his ‘racist’ stop-and-frisk policy.

It was the kind of full-on circular firing squad that commentators had warned might be coming in South Carolina, with Joe Biden’s ‘firewall’ claims on the line and Sanders having the potential to pad his delegate lead in the rush to Super Tuesday.

The debate featured chaotic exchanges where multiple candidates sought to talk over each other, with CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Gayle King losing all control of the discussion about 40 minutes into the debate, either failing to referee or being completely ignored by the over-eager candidates.

Candidates flouted 75-second response times, cut each other off, and yelled out retorts out of turn. ‘Not true,’ interjected Sanders when Amy Klobuchar questioned how he’ll pay for his programs. ‘Can I say something?’ pleaded hedge funder Tom Steyer later in the heated exchange. ‘Let me go,’ he demanded.

‘Excuse me, can I respond to the attack?’ Sanders inquired when Pete Buttigieg went after him. ‘Listen to the moderator, guys,’ Sanders schooled the group. ‘Hello?’ chimed in Biden.

Then the former vice president complained when he finally got called on. ‘Whoa. Whoa. Whoa,’ he said. ‘I guess the only way you do this is jump in and speak twice as long as you should.’ Later, he boiled over and announced he would defy the unenforced rules. ‘I’m not out of time. You spoke over time and I’m going to talk,’ Biden said.

The problem, of course, is that MPAI, and the US electorate has never been less intelligent or more short-term time-preferenced in its history. And the first fake poll is out, which is obviously meaningless because it leaves out Bloomberg and has Steyer at 15 percent. The only thing significant about it is that it confirms that the media prefers Biden to Sanders.

  • 27{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} Creepy Joe
  • 23{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} The Socialist Jew
  • 15{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} The Other Rich Guy
  • 09{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} Little Gay Pete
  • 08{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} Fauxahauntas
  • 05{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} The Jewess (soccer mom edition)

No worries, it was destined to be

The following exchange with my old friend Jamsco amused me. Mostly because I was pretty sure we’d been over this before. Keep in mind we’ve known each other since we were children and he is one of the two early Selenoth readers, so we are pretty straightforward with each other.

VD: It’s always easy to detect the inversionists. They cannot tell the truth because, knowingly or not, they serve the Father of Lies. Piper’s words directly belie the words of Jesus Christ himself. That tells you everything you need to know about the man and his teachings.

JS: I suspect, Vox, that if you actually read Piper’s devotional you’d (1) agree with 85{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of it, and (2) see that the above description is whole inaccurate and deceptive.

VD: Every single thing of Piper’s I’ve read to date has not only been materially wrong, but egregiously so to the point of being insulting to the intelligence. I still haven’t forgotten how tornadoes are the murderous fingers of the Jesus Christ as he slays the innocent and the wicked alike as per God’s perfect plan.

JS: I see you haven’t forgotten it, nor did you learn it from him. He said nothing of the sort. Read it again. Confirmation bias is real.

VD: You claimed that Piper “said nothing of the sort”, Jamsco. That may or may not be true. But he certainly WROTE it.

“Why would God reach down his hand and drag his fierce fingers across rural America, killing at least 38 people with 90 tornadoes in 12 states, and leaving some small towns with scarcely a building standing, including churches?

“God alone has the last say in where and how the wind blows. If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.

“Jesus rules the wind. The tornadoes were his.

“But before Jesus took any life in rural America, he gave his own on the rugged cross.”

JS: I didn’t know he’d written this. Obviously I agree with what he says here (and I think it’s biblical), but you’re correct – he wrote it.

Just to be fair to Jamsco, I will point out that the fact that I previously posted on the subject doesn’t mean that he read that post. Also, I have not read the referenced devotional, and so it is possible that the description to which I reacted is inaccurate and deceptive. I tend to doubt it on the basis of every previous reading of his writings, but I admit that it is possible.

And no, I’m not going to bother to check, because I was neither created nor destined to take the man seriously. I am content to leave it up to you, gentle readers, to adjudicate the truth of the matter.

Thank you, Corona-chan!

Dear President Trump,

The Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization declared on January 30, 2020 that the Coronavirus outbreak meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. As this is a global health emergency, it is undeniable that the national security interest of the American people leaves you no choice but to declare martial law in the United States.

Please do so at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,
The concerned citizens of the United States of America

PS: If martial law helps you Drain the Swamp, Build the Wall, and restore the 1965 demographic balance of the population while you’re at it, so be it.