A glimpse into Gamma

He began badly:

(I don’t know what’s your overall opinion about Donald Trump. But, if you mainly support him…)

Don’t be fooled by the fakes.

What I don’t know (being new to this blog, and not having time to read all the posts) is what is the overall opinion of Vox about Donald Trump (being Vox a Patriot, and given the fact that most Patriots support Donald Trump).

And, I just thought that my observation was, nevertheless, an interesting one that I should make – just in case anyone (including the readers of this blog) is not aware of this type of schemes played by the establishment.

A classic Gamma entry. He doesn’t know even the most basic thing about the blog, the blog owner, or the blog readership, but he just thought that his observation was an interesting and necessary one that he should make in the event that these people about whom he knows nothing don’t know it. So helpful!

To which I responded:

Don’t Gamma. No one here likes Gammas. That is Gamma thinking. As a general rule, don’t share unsolicited information. If someone wants to know, they will ask.

Of course, operating as he was in ignorance, the Gamma promptly apologized and stopped annoying everyone, right? No, of course not! Pass up a chance to talk about himself and his motivations? Perish the thought!

You’re immensely wrong, in the evaluation you make of me.

The reason why I shared this type of knowledge (and have posted maybe similar comments in here) was to *Warn* people, about this kind of things, so that they don’t fall in this (and other) kind of traps, put out by the establishment.

And, as with any (important) warning that everyone thinks that they should make, when in doubt if people are already aware of such facts, the best option is to always make such warnings, just in case. (Like, if you know there’s a seller in your city that is scamming people, and you see someone that is heading for his shop, your natural reaction is to go warn the possibly ignorant buyer.)

That’s all there is.

The overall majority of my comments are made up of information that I consider to be of interest to (and important to share with) other people, about different aspects of the powers-that-be. And, I always post them to try to “enlighten” people. I’m not the kind of person who likes to listen to himself. I come from a “citizen journalist” background. And, it’s within the same journalistic spirit that I continue to make posts and comments. To inform people.

But, if you don’t like to receive unsolicited information, then I will stop doing it on your blog.

Let me be perfectly clear. I don’t like to receive unsolicited information. I don’t want people to share their Very Special Opinion or Very Important Advice or Very Breaking News From An Underground News Site That No One Reads Like The Drudge Report here. I ask very smart people for advice on a regular basis. If I do not ask you for your advice, then obviously I don’t want it. Because if I did, I would ask for it.

If you’re a “citizen-journalist”, if you feel the need to “enlighten” and “warn” people, that’s just fine. Go do it on your own site and stop trying to hijack everyone else’s microphones.

Words mean things

It’s really rather remarkable to see all the self-styled “conservatives” who suddenly develop a new predilection for creative linguistic interpretations worthy of a postmodernist disciple of Foucault and concocting ex post facto legal contortions to put the Warren Court’s “emanations and penumbras” to shame when the clear meaning of “Posterity” is pointed out to them.<

Let reason be silent when the dictionary and a comprehensive set of historical examples conclusively gainsay its conclusions.

The undeniable historical fact is that the U.S. Constitution was no more written to protect the interests of 19th century Irish immigrants and their US-citizen descendants than it was to protect the rights of people living in Iran, Libya, or Mexico today. The reason this fact still matters today is that to cede one claim is to automatically cede the other.

Never listen to Trotskyites

Pat Buchanan observes that the failure of the neocons has been comprehensive:

The failures that killed the Bush party, and that represented departures from Reaganite traditionalism and conservatism, are:

First, the hubristic drive, despite the warnings of statesmen like George Kennan, to exploit our Cold War victory and pursue a policy of permanent containment of a Russia that had lost a third of its territory and half its people.

We moved NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic, onto her doorstep. We abrogated the ABM treaty Nixon had negotiated and moved defensive missiles into Poland. John McCain pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and even to send U.S. forces to face off against Russian troops.

Thus we got a second Cold War that need never have begun and that our allies seem content to let us fight alone.

Europe today is not afraid of Vladimir Putin reaching the Rhine. Europe is afraid of Africa and the Middle East reaching the Danube.

Let the Americans, who relish playing empire, pay for NATO.

Second, in a reflexive response to 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, dumped over the regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Bashar Assad in Syria, and backed Saudi intervention in a Yemeni civil war, creating a humanitarian crisis in that poorest of Arab countries that is exceeded in horrors only by the Syrian civil war.

Since Y2K, hundreds of thousands in the Middle East have perished, the ancient Christian community has all but ceased to exist, and the refugees now number in the millions. What are the gains for democracy from these wars, all backed enthusiastically by the Republican establishment?

Why are the people responsible for these wars still being listened to, rather than confessing their sins at second-thoughts conferences?

The GOP elite also played a crucial role in throwing open U.S. markets to China and ceding transnational corporations full freedom to move factories and jobs there and ship their Chinese-made goods back here, free of charge.

Result: In three decades, the U.S. has run up $12 trillion in merchandise trade deficits — $4 trillion with China — and Beijing’s revenue from the USA has more than covered China’s defense budget for most of those years.

The Trotskyites lost the Soviet Union, but gained the Republican Party. Now they’ve lost that, and all they’ve got is Max Boot, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the pathetic ideogicial non-movement that should rightfully have been christened the Idiotic Dork Web.

The unreliability of science

Remember, this is the standard by which Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris believe truth should be measured:

“The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy,” said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.

This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made….

“Diet is one of the most horrible areas of biomedical investigation,” professor Ioannidis added — and not just due to conflicts of interest with various food industries. “Measuring diet is extremely difficult,” he stressed. How can we precisely quantify what people eat?

In this field, researchers often go in wild search of correlations within huge databases, without so much as a starting hypothesis. Even when the methodology is good, with the gold standard being a study where participants are chosen at random, the execution can fall short.

A famous 2013 study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet against heart disease had to be retracted in June by the most prestigious of medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, because not all participants were randomly recruited; the results have been revised downwards.

So what should we take away from the flood of studies published every day?

Ioannidis recommends asking the following questions: is this something that has been seen just once, or in multiple studies? Is it a small or a large study? Is this a randomized experiment? Who funded it? Are the researchers transparent?

These precautions are fundamental in medicine, where bad studies have contributed to the adoption of treatments that are at best ineffective, and at worst harmful.

In their book “Ending Medical Reversal,” Vinayak Prasad and Adam Cifu offer terrifying examples of practices adopted on the basis of studies that went on to be invalidated, such as opening a brain artery with stents to reduce the risk of a new stroke.

It was only after 10 years that a robust, randomized study showed that the practice actually increased the risk of stroke.

Never forget that science cannot be considered reliable until it is called “engineering”. Until then, the most that one can accurately assume is that it has about a fifty percent chance of actually being correct. The fact that some physicists got some very accurate results in the 1950s says precisely nothing about that study published by a biologist or a medical researcher or an economist 70 years later.

When civility is not the answer

Matthew Cochran explains that civility can be a category error for conservatives:

Because civility is not a moral absolute and its form is always adjusting along with culture, it’s requirements are determined primarily by social contract — the kind of behavior we all implicitly or explicitly agree to when interacting with one another. Historically, some of these contracts have been great blessings while others have been reprehensible, but all are, by nature, contracts.

The detail that conservatives tend to forget is that when one party violates a contract, the other party is no longer bound by all of its terms. If you sign a contract to buy a car, and the dealer refuses to turn it over you, you aren’t “sinking to their level” by refusing to hand over your money. If you contract an employee who never shows up for work, you aren’t “repaying evil for evil” by withholding his wages. The same is true when dealing with people who are deliberately uncivil to civil people — it fundamentally changes what the rest of society owes them.

To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we must recklessly abandon civility whenever we get angry at the latest atrocious behavior from liberals. Civility is extremely valuable and is never something that should be tossed aside lightly. You need only look at the social justice left to see the consequences of doing so. Their enemies are not limited to conservatives. They rail just as hard against common sense when they melt down over beliefs that were shared by virtually everyone who ever lived until last week. They even cannibalize the very leftists who carried them to term whenever they’re triggered. Accordingly, conservatives are quite right to try and conserve valuable social structures like courtesy — they prevent all manner of chaos and suffering.

That said, civility does not actually exist between two parties when even one of them is deliberately uncivil. The unfortunate reality is that we increasingly find ourselves in circumstances in which there is nothing left to conserve. We need to stop taking the lazy road of “be civil though the heavens fall” and begin being deliberate about when to be civil — and when not to be.

First things first. There are no style points being awarded when it comes to saving Western civilization. There is only success and failure.

Better late than too late

The European nations are finally getting around to shielding their soft southern underbelly, fortunately before the coming African overpopulation crisis gets completely out of hand:

Europe will shut its southern doors to migrants under plans to be discussed by Germany, Austria and Italy next week, it has emerged. Germany’s hardline Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said talks would take place between the three nations on how to close the Mediterranean route into the EU. His announcement comes after a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and amid plans being considered by Germany’s government for new immigration measures at their shared border.

It’s a good first step. The second step will be to launch Salvini’s quarter-by-quarter repatriations. Preferably on a continent-wide scale.

Following our lead

DC Comics is now imitating Arkhaven Comics:

Apparently, things come in threes. This looks like the third reveal about DC Comics upcoming plans for their monthly comic book line. – only one of which they have admitted to. This morning, Bleeding Cool told you about DC’s exclusive Walmart anthologies, serialising new Batman comics by Brian Bendis and Superman comics by Tom King which then got confirmed everywhere.

We then told you that DC Comics were moving their $3.99 line of comics from 20-page stories to 22-page stories, to justify the price point and steal a march on Marvel Comics.

And now? As a result of their investment into the 100 page Walmart anthology titles and the print stock needed for those titles, DC Comics are going to shift from glossy paper to non-glossy paper for their entire line.

Arkhaven already prints on non-glossy paper. And we don’t do 20-page stories, but 24-page stories. 20 percent more for 25 percent less! Of course, our 24-page stories retail for only $2.99 and aren’t full of SJW preaching. Check out the print editions here.

It could have been worse

We should probably take it easy on Disney for creating SJW Wars. Sure, they irretrievably and unnecessarily ruined the epic space opera franchise, but what most people don’t know is that George Lucas was going to ruin it anyhow.

The two-time best director Oscar nominee confided his vision to none other than James Cameron, who interviewed Lucas for “Space,” the second episode of his recent six-part AMC series “James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction.” A transcript from their talk appears in the companion book of the same name, published by Insight Editions on May 18. In it, Lucas reveals that he would have turned his gaze from the cosmos to what can be viewed only under a microscope.

“[The next three ‘Star Wars’ films] were going to get into a microbiotic world,” he told Cameron. “There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Lucas admitted, “Everybody hated it in ‘Phantom Menace’ [when] we started talking about midi-chlorians.” In terms of his storytelling, Lucas regarded individuals as “vehicles for the Whills to travel around in…And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”

Say what you will about Soylo and Space Leia and Ninja Pixie Force Princess and the Magic Negro Stormtrooper, but even the sum total of those unmitigated disasters still isn’t as bad as The Fantastic Star Wars Voyage: Free Whillies would have been.

This following video, however, is pretty cool. It’s a collection of 3D animation clips based on Ralph Mcquarrie’s original concept art for The Star Wars. When I was a kid, I had a collection of these concept sketches that were sold printed in color on oversized glossy paper.

You knew Marvel would make me a villain

Sooner or later. It was inevitable.

The Kree’s homeworld of Hala is in ruin, but the alien empire has sounded the call to war and directed it at the Inhumans. They have sent Black Bolt a direct message, “Join or Die.” But this is no ordinary message. It’s written in blood. The blood of Inhumans. The blood of 11,038 Inhumans. That’s right. The Kree Empire butchered 11,038 Inhumans to send Black Bolt a message that he will join the Kree Empire or die.

These 11,038 Inhumans wouldn’t be the only casualties. Four Inhuman queens would also perish at the hands of the Kree.

And they would be joined by some of Black Bolt’s closest allies. Triton falls to the Kree when he is unable to escape the blast radius of a bomb left as a trap for Black Bolt and his Royal Family.

Triton wouldn’t be the only one close to Black Bolt to perish. He would be joined by Lockjaw and Maximus who fell to the ferocious power of a brand new villain and the first of a brand new race to the Marvel Universe. This villain is a Super-Inhuman known as Vox. This new villain, Vox, is described as the “voice and the wrath of the gods. He is the full-throated scream of the Kree Empire.”

Except the real Vox doesn’t want the subhumans – as the SJWs at Marvel are more properly known – to join the Evil Legion of Evil. What are the odds that Vox’s evil minions are both vile and faceless?

He cannot be swayed or tricked or bought, for he wants nothing but his enemies’ hearts to stop beating.

See, now that does sound familiar…. As does the New Arkhaven… I mean, Arctilan. And they did get the scythe right too. But where is Spacebunny?

You don’t say

Item One: This Fourth of July, nearly 14,000 immigrants become America’s newest citizens, swearing the oath of allegiance at 27 naturalization ceremonies across the nation that coincide with the country’s 242nd birthday and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “When oath ceremonies are tied to the Fourth of July, it’s a message that immigrants believe in this country. It’s a beautiful and emotional thing,” Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, said. “United nations, from Albania to Yemen, are represented in the ceremonies.”

Item Two: This Fourth of July marks a low point in U.S. patriotism. For the first time in Gallup’s 18-year history asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than a majority say they are “extremely proud.” Currently, 47{f82a6d9b5e5cff01d97267394322fca158507b75156f51cfa613d94c4c7ae29a} describe themselves this way, down from 51{f82a6d9b5e5cff01d97267394322fca158507b75156f51cfa613d94c4c7ae29a} in 2017 and well below the peak of 70{f82a6d9b5e5cff01d97267394322fca158507b75156f51cfa613d94c4c7ae29a} in 2003.

How can they not be proud, when “Americans” from Albania to Yemen are now their fellow citizens? And it’s interesting, is it not, that all those nations are represented in the ceremonies.