Category: Uncategorized

The end of the EU

The abomination appears to be in its death throes.

A new German plan to impose “haircuts” on holders of eurozone sovereign debt risks igniting an unstoppable European bond crisis and could force Italy and Spain to restore their own currencies, a top adviser to the German government has warned.

“It is the fastest way to break up the eurozone,” said Professor Peter Bofinger, one of the five “Wise Men” on the German Council of Economic Advisers.

“A speculative attack could come very fast. If I were a politician in Italy and I was confronted by this sort of insolvency risk I would want to go back to my own currency as fast as possible, because that is the only way to avoid going bankrupt,” he told The Telegraph.

The German Council has called for a “sovereign insolvency mechanism” even though this overturns the financial principles of the post-war order in Europe, deeming such a move necessary to restore the credibility of the “no-bailout” clause in the Maastricht Treaty. Prof Bofinger issued a vehement dissent.

The plan has the backing of the Bundesbank and most recently the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, who usually succeeds in imposing his will in the eurozone. Sensitive talks are under way in key European capitals, causing shudders in Rome, Madrid and Lisbon.

Deflation is killing the bond markets; governments require an ever-growing inflation in order to pay off their debts in cheaper money. That’s why interest rates have been driven negative, but it’s a fool’s game because the problem continues to expand the longer the day of reckoning is delayed.

Although complete collapse is unlikely, between the migrant crisis, the debt crisis, and Brexit, it’s possible that 2016 will see the first European nations break free of the Fourth Reich.

Words are magic

A minor dialogue on Twitter cracked me up today. To put it in context, some scientists and science fetishists on Twitter were in an uproar over my assertion that SCIENTIFIC PEER REVIEW was not only unreliable, but was nothing more than glorified proofreading. They argued that SCIENTIFIC PEER REVIEW was all about replicating experiments and testing conclusions, not merely reading over the material in order to make sure the author wasn’t smoking crack.

One guy even demanded to know if I knew what “peer” meant. Because, you know, that totally changes the process.

Finally, I asked a scientist how many peer reviews he had done. Between 10 and 30 was the answer. Fair enough. Then I asked him how many experiments he had replicated as part of those SCIENTIFIC PEER REVIEWS.

None. Or to put in scientific mathematical terms, zero. Also known as “the null set”.

And what did he actually do in scientifically peer-reviewing these papers? Well, he read them and occasionally made some suggestions for improving them.

[INSERT FACE PALM OF YOUR CHOICE HERE]

That is why I am strongly considering changing my title from Lead Editor of Castalia House to Lead Scientific Peer Reviewer. Because then, you see, we won’t merely be publishing fiction, we’ll be publishing PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE.

UPDATE: This was Real Live Scientist with More than TEN Proofreads Peer Reviews David Whitcombe’s response to finding out that scientists with considerably more experience agreed with me.

David Whitcombe ‏@hauxton
Ooh
You wrote a blog.
Still misunderstanding peer review.
Over your head in guess
 
David Whitcombe ‏@hauxton
Laughable Dunning Kruger

Thereby supporting my hypothesis that SJWs always double down.

Trump destroys Hillary

VDH explains how Donald Trump, in a single day, managed to do what the entire Republican political establishment couldn’t do in eight years:

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

It’s interesting how the Republican pragmatists are beginning to see the advantage of backing Trump rather than yet another GOPe loser.

Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Related Work

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Related Work category:

  • Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson. Begun in 2014, Jeffro finished his massive 43-post exploration of Gary Gygax’s famous appendix of science fiction and fantasy works that inspired the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 2015.
  • Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini. An incredibly in-depth, 826-page literary analysis of every piece of fiction published by Gene Wolf during the 35 years specified.
  • The Story of Moira Greyland by Moira Greyland. The daughter of Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley speaks for herself about the dark side of science fiction fandom.
  • Safe Space as Rape Room by Daniel Eness. A five-part series on the disturbing and recurring problem that science fiction fandom has been attempting to hide from the outside world for more than fifty years.
  • SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. The bestselling work of political philosophy; it happens to contain the most accurate account of both GamerGate and the 2015 Hugo Awards controversy available today.

Other 2016 Hugo categories

On a not entirely unrelated note, one of my recommendations for Best Fan Writer, Dave Freer, explains how the advocates of the rule change to the Hugo Awards known as EPH are not only biased, but are behaving unethically by violating their non-disclosure agreement and reporting on the “results” they claim to have found.

Fast forward to this year. To File 770. Where Jameson Quinn – one of the Making Light cabal plotting to institute EPH announces that he and Bruce Schneier have been given the anonymized data, and tested it. Incidentally (because he’s not too bright, it seems) he announces that there is a weak correlation between the non-puppy nominations and what was nominated, but that this was much stronger in the puppies and what they nominated. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that, without knowing the ‘secret slates’ Quinn and Schneier could not separate voters for those cabals from other voters. So: if a ‘weak’ correlation shows up with ALL of the data, there is a high probability that indeed, there was secret concert voting by some. After all, the pattern of ‘you nominate mine, I’ll nominate yours’ is well known and documented from the Nebula Awards, before they anonymized that nomination process. It may well still go on, but it is harder to see. Many of the same authors come up in Hugo nominations, which should be unlikely. The one is supposed to be a peer award, the other a fan award.

Which leads us to: how did Quinn and Schneier get data which was not available to everyone because giving it to anyone breached voter confidentiality and privacy rules? I don’t know either from Adam  — but Quinn & Schneier came from a group which has a questionable reputation, has a financial interest in the outcome of the Hugos. Unless they are babes-in-wood those who provided the data to Quinn and Schneier knew that they were not people who could be considered neutral by a substantial number of the people whose data they were handing over. The two ‘researchers’ also knew full well they were not considered neutral or trusted: Quinn posts on File 770, another well-known anti-puppy site.

“As previously announced, it was determined that the data was unable to be sufficiently anonymized for a general release, so the researchers were provided data under a non-disclosure agreement.”

I see. A non-disclosure agreement… with a pair of ‘researchers’ from a partisan group with a questionable reputation and a financial interest. In secret.

My, that looks REALLY ethical. And no one spoke up. Not one of the Hugo Admins involved went public. Even those who objected… thought if they kept quiet, they’d get away with it. I see. Rather like: “I complained to him when he was molesting the little girl, I tried to get him to stop, but he did it anyway, and I didn’t go to the cops, because he was one of us.” My word! We can TRUST you after that. You would never permit anyone to diddle the system for their favorites.

And Jameson Quinn promptly breached their non-disclosure agreement. Well, what did you expect? Rules are for little people.

There is no reason to believe anything that Quinn and Schneier claim; they are observably untrustworthy on the basis of their affiliations, declarations, and NDA-violating actions.

    SJWAL: an epiphany

    Bryan has been contemplating SJWs Always Lie and a second reading inspired him to a deeper understanding of SJW objectives.

    Having twice read this book, and having for a while now been digesting its contents, I’ve come to a sudden and clarifying realization –

    SJWs are not out to stop abuse — they are out to obtain a monopoly on it.

    This explains why they so fervently and universally seek positions of power and to manipulate procedure to empower themselves. From gutting the right to due process in academia to making it impossible to obtain the identity of your accuser in the workplace, SJWs in academic administration and corporate HR are exercising ill-gotten power to destroy the livelihoods and lives of those who oppose their world view and odious conduct.

    The organization they have captured such as Yahoo!, Twitter, and OSS communities are slowly dying deaths of a thousand distractions. Their specialty seems to spin narratives and organize against important developers who won’t carry their ideological water, or who oppose their encroachment. The best engineers in the world are leaving in droves due to maltreatment at the hands of politically-appointed executives and HR departments growing ever more vicious and unrestrained against employees. An SJW HR department, having gained enough momentum, will even strong arm the very CEOs and CTOs for who they are supposed to, at a minimum function.

    He’s correct. In fact, they are out to obtain a monopoly on more than abuse, they are out to obtain a monopoly on power through the means of controlling information flow.

    This was always true of Wikipedia, but it has become increasingly obvious through the actions of Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, and even Google. They are attempting to police the public’s thoughts through controlling the information accessible to it. It’s a soft form of intellectual totalitarianism imposed through seduction rather than force.

    This is why projects like Brave and Big Fork are so vitally important and should be supported by everyone who values freedom, including the freedoms of speech, expression, and thought. And speaking of the latter project, we are approximately 2-3 weeks away from early access. Don’t ask for it now, because if you’re on the list, you already know what’s going on. If you’re not sure, then you’re not on the list and will need to be patient.

    Shadowbanned!

    Apparently the Twitterthorities have deemed that I, too, am a threat to the innocent minds of the Twittership:

    Dharma Warrior ‏@India_empower
    @voxday strangely, your tweets don’t show up on my TL. I have to visit your Twitter page to read ur tweets.

    Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
    It’s the Twitter shadowban. They’re trying to limit the reach of the Alt Right because we are too appealing.

    I feel like Neal Patrick Harris at the end of the execrable Starship Troopers movie.

    “They’re afraid… they’re afraid of us!” 

    We don’t need to silence them in order to win. We only have to make sure that our voices are heard.

    Thunder of the North

    As students of military history know, large-scale military exercises are often used to mask the mobilizations that precede an invasion. That is why many observers are more than a little bit nervous about the implications of the joint Saudi-Turkish exercises called Thunder in the North, as they believe it to be an invasion of Syria meant to stop the Russian-Syrian alliance from defeating the anti-Assad rebels in Aleppo.

    Saudi military spokesman Brigadier-General Ahmed al-Asiri said his country is prepared for a land war in Syria, the Saudi-backed Asharq al-Awsat reported on Tuesday.

    Asiri’s statement to the London- based paper comes after his country announced last week its willing to send ground troops as part of the international coalition to fight Islamic State.

    The Senior Saudi defense official said that his country wants to defeat Islamic State.

    He also announced Saudi Arabia would hold a large-scale military exercise called “Thunder of the North” with the participation of 21 Arab and Muslim countries. The exercise would enhance coordination and information sharing between the countries, Asiri said.

    He added, according to the report, that “when participating countries feel that there are coordinated and interdependent efforts, the results of the exercise will be positive.

    There is talk of “350,000 troops, 2,540 warplanes,
    20,000 tanks and 460 helicopters”, which frankly sounds completely absurd to me in light of the fact that the Saudis have had to rely upon Colombian mercenaries in their largely unsuccessful effort to fight the Yemeni rebels. So, too, is the idea that the Russians would resort to tactical nukes in order to stop them. However, the Saker, who is considerably more credible than a Saudi military spokesman, has indicated that there may indeed be reason for concern, and not just because of the 18,000 troops that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has stationed near the border:

    The problem for the USA is that it has no good option to achieve its overriding goal in Syria: to “prevent Russia from winning”. In the delusional minds of the AngloZionist rulers, Russia is just a “regional power” which cannot be allowed to defy the “indispensable nation”. And yet, Russia is doing exactly that both in Syria and in the Ukraine and Obama’s entire Russia policy is in shambles. Can he afford to appear so weak in an election year? Can the US “deep state” let the Empire be humiliated and its weakness exposed?

    The latest news strongly suggests to me that the White House has taken the decision to let Turkey and Saudi Arabia invade Syria. Turkish officials are openly saying that an invasion is imminent and that the goal of such an invasion would be to reverse the Syrian army gains along the boder and near Aleppo. The latest reports are also suggesting that the Turks have begun shelling Aleppo. None of that could be happening without the full support of CENTCOM and the White House.

    The Empire has apparently concluded that Daesh is not strong enough to overthrow Assad, at least not when the Russian AeroSpace forces are supporting him, so it will now unleash the Turks and the Saudis in the hope of changing the outcome of this war or, if that is not possible, to carve up Syria into ‘zones of responsibility” – all under the pretext of fighting Daesh, of course.

    The Russian task force in Syria is about to be very seriously challenged and I don’t see how it could deal with this new threat by itself. I very much hope that I am wrong here, but I have do admit that a *real* Russian intervention in Syria might happen after all, with MiG-31s and all. In fact, in the next few days, we are probably going to witness a dramatic escalation of the conflict in Syria.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that President Obama has been very, very quiet of late. That, combined with the massive jump in the price of gold recently, seems to indicate that something non-trivial is in the works, although I can’t seem to find any information on when the exercises are scheduled to begin.

    On loyalties, divided and whole

    What is reprehensible is not the suggestion that Jews living in America might have divided loyalties. That is arguably the best case scenario. What is reprehensible, and quite possibly anti-semitic, is the idea that a Jew living in America cannot possibly have divided loyalties:

    Congress is rarely called upon to dispel conspiracy theories. But it needs to teach the Pentagon to separate fact from fiction, because American Jews are routinely denied security clearances based on nothing more than a fear that they are Israeli spies.

    Consider Gershon Pincus, a 62-year-old dentist and lifelong New Yorker who sought a way to serve as he approached retirement. He found a position at a naval dental clinic in upstate Saratoga Springs, and started work in July 2014.

    All was going well until this past September, when Pincus was informed that he wasn’t eligible for a security clearance. The rejection was accompanied by a Statement of Reasons that concluded “foreign contacts and interests may be a security concern due to divided loyalties.”

    Incredibly, the totality of the concern about Pincus was his contact with his 89-year-old mother and his middle-aged brother and sister, who had moved to Israel as adults.

    The charge of “divided loyalties” has a particularly repugnant resonance to American Jews. It’s usually whispered behind closed doors, and so it’s doubly disconcerting when it is the reason given for official government action.

    It is perfectly reasonable to suspect a Jew with family ties to Israel of being less than entirely loyal to the United States; I have met very, very few American Jews who have declared that they would be willing to wage war against Israel on America’s behalf. Yes, Israel is a nominal ally at present, but then, America has waged war against former allies and made allies of former enemies throughout the course of its history. And Israeli forces have killed more American soldiers than most Arab or Eastern Bloc militaries.

    It is known that Israel spies on the USA; indeed, Israel would be criminally remiss if it did not do so. But it is no more in the American national interest to permit Israel to spy than it is to permit China, Russia, or Germany to do so.

    For most Americans, the issue isn’t whether Jews have divided loyalties or not, it is whether they have any loyalty to the USA at all, given how Jewish opinion leaders such as Spengler and the Learned Elders of Wye quite openly demonstrate that they, at least, do not.

    Of course, this isn’t a matter of concern that is limited to Jews. The same problem applies to Chinese citizens resident in the USA as well as many other nations. The idea that any individual can legitimately possess dual citizenships or undivided loyalties to more than one nation is a pernicious and dyscivic notion, and I expect that as the pendulum returns to historical normality and long-suppressed nationalism rises around the world, the nonsensical concept will eventually be erased from the law.

    The technocultural war

    Milo explains how Facebook-Instagram-Whatsapp has joined with the governments around the world in an unholy alliance to create a global Big Brother:

    It’s not just Facebook we’re talking about. They own WhatsApp and they own Instagram. And WhatsApp and Instagram are two of the companies that are winning the short messaging war–that are winning the war for Millennial attention and for Millennial users. Twitter lost that war. Twitter only really appeals to media people: people like you and people like me. We want to kind of keep in touch with our peers. And then some of our fans who are, like, really really keen might sign up for a Twitter account just to see our witty sayings or whatever clever lines we toss off on the way to the train station in the morning. But primarily, Twitter has lost that war. Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp–these are the networks that have billions of users. These are the networks that are getting young users, and Facebook owns two of those three.

    The other thing to bear in mind is that Facebook so far has a really really bad track record when it comes to free speech. And not just a bad track record censoring different political opinions like Twitter does. Facebook’s moves are even more sinister, in a way. Facebook has teamed up with governments to censor certain political opinions that the incumbent party doesn’t like. In Germany, for instance, Facebook has teamed up with Angela Merkel to censor reasonable, respectable, mainstream concern about mass Muslim immigration–or just about mass immigration in general–and has started removing this stuff and classifying it as “hate speech.” It is effectively slandering its own users saying that their perfectly reasonable points of view constitute “hate speech” and that they’re not going to be allowed on Facebook, and Facebook has promised the German government that this stuff will be removed within 24 hours. That is outright Orwellian. That is outright terrifying.

    Facebook is pure ideological evil. Don’t use it. Don’t support it. We will have alternatives, they are in the works and they are on the way, but they are going to take time to develop and they are going to need your support.

    But we don’t need to be worried. We need to be resolute. We can beat them. We will beat them at their game, even though they have the money power on their side. Because the money power is not merely creaking, it is cracking, and we are the side in harmony with truth and reality.

    The pendulum always swings back. Never forget that. And the harder they work to restrain it and hold it fixed to one side, the more vicious and unstoppable the return of the pendulum will be.

    The last defender of the Constitution

    RIP Antonin Scalia:

    Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. The statement did not indicate the cause of death, but several news
    outlets reported that he died of natural causes while in Texas this
    weekend.

    Scalia was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986.

    It’s sobering to think that he may be the last genuine Constitutionalist to sit on the Supreme Court. One can only expect that he’ll be replaced by a black female Marxist.

    Ross Douthat summed up the man well: “We should all die full of years, with 28 grandchildren, in our sleep after quail hunting.”

    That is the sign of a life well-lived.