An interview with the BBC

I decided to violate my usual no-interviews policy today because the interview requested didn’t concern me, but rather, Donald Trump. BBC World was looking for Americans outside the USA who support Donald Trump, and a producer discovered my debate with Louise Mensch on Heat Street concerning the subject.

I don’t expect the interview to air, because if there is one thing the media does not want to hear right now, it is that a few remarks about women, however unpalatable, aren’t going to change any rational individual’s mind about Donald Trump. At worst, they indicate that Trump would be a president in the mode of Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy rather than Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

And while it may be true that having a President who is prone to bawdy banter would be bad for women, do you know what is really bad for women? Being raped by immigrants. And do you know what is even worse for women? Being nuked by Russian missiles.

As I told the host, there are only two issues that matter in this presidential election:

  • Immigration
  • War with Russia

On both issues, Donald Trump is the much, much better candidate than Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State laid the groundwork for the current war-by-proxy the US military is waging against Russia in Syria and Ukraine.

As I told him, if you are a European, if you are British, regardless of what you think of the man personally, you should not be hoping that Donald Trump is the next U.S. President, you should be praying that he is. Because neither immigration nor war with Russia will be to your benefit either.

So, yeah, I tend to doubt it will ever see air.

On a tangentially-related note, someone mentioned on Monday that a comprehensive list of anti-Trump Republicans would be useful going forward. Lo and behold, there is now a comprehensive list of anti-Trump Republicans available on Infogalactic.

Lawlessness in Germany

This is quite literally treason on the part of Germany’s federal migrant agents:

The German federal migrant agency has admitted that they are letting in migrants even when they have full knowledge that the passports and documentation they carry have been forged. A new report suggests that the German agency in control of migration, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), knew that passports used by migrants who flooded into the country last year were fake – but let the migrants attempt to claim asylum anyway.

Die Welt reports that BAMF had processed some 217,465 passports, birth certificates, and driver’s licenses of asylum seekers and that 2,273 of these documents had been forged.

According to German law, the penalty for forging documentation – especially passports and travel visas – is five years in prison. So far, no migrants have been arrested.

Law enforcement in Germany are extremely concerned by the numbers of migrants who have entered the country on false documentation.

We are truly entering revolutionary times. The governments of the West now openly harbor more contempt for their nations than the historical European monarchs ever did.

How much do you have to hate your own people to knowingly break the law in order to invite the Turk inside the gates?

Social media spies

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are spying on you for the Federal government:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

We are pleased that after we reported our findings to the companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook has cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts. Twitter has also taken some recent steps to rein in Geofeedia though it has not ended the data relationship.

Further steps are required if these companies are to live up to their principles and policies by protecting users of all backgrounds engaging in political and social discourse. So today the ACLU of California, the Center for Media Justice, and Color of Change are calling on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to commit to concrete changes to better protect users going forward. Read our letters here and here.

We first learned about these agreements with Geofeedia from responses to public records requests to 63 California law enforcement agencies. These records revealed the fast expansion of social media surveillance with little-to-no debate or oversight.

But as we continued to comb through thousands of pages of documents, we saw emails from Geofeedia representatives telling law enforcement about its special access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram user data.

Seriously, even SJWs are going to be clamoring to switch to Alt-Tech social media sites soon. And frankly, even SJWs will be treated more fairly on Infogalactic than most of them are on Wikipedia.

Always happy to help

My, such excitement and drama revolving around Worldcon 75:

A growing controversy over Dave Weingart’s termination as Music department head, brought about by his explanation and complaint on LiveJournal, and the 2017 Helsinki Worldcon committee’s effort to explain and justify their actions on Facebook, has been defused by the Worldcon 75 issuing an apology and taking down its Facebook thread about the matter. Weingart says he has also received a verbal apology from one of the chairs….

Weingart had already made private his LiveJournal posts about the controversy in reaction to Vox Day linking to them from Vox Popoli:

Because Vox Day and his miserable crew of people have glommed onto my disagreement with Worldcon 75 I have made my DW/LJ posts mentioning any other party private. I’ve done likewise with my FB posts.

After Worldcon 75 took down its Facebook thread, Weingart responded:

The wording of Worldcon’s posted apology is something I agreed to verbally on the phone with one of the co-chairs on 2016-10-10, when I was also given a verbal apology. Worldcon’s deleting their other post on this subject (on the Worldcon 75 page) was done with my explicit permission as well. Whatever the disagreement, neither Worldcon 75 nor I want Vox Day to have anything to do with this.

I suppose I’ll just write up a little summary for Infogalactic then. Worldcon 75: Controversies. And since there isn’t any source information to which we can link it, given the way it’s all been hidden away, I guess that just leaves it up to me being able to remember everything correctly.

So, this all started when some sad filkish gamma started stalking a Swedish girl at a science fiction convention, right? I’m sure it will come back to me… perhaps the miserable crew can help jog my memory.

Scientistry vs scientody

The profession is structurally incentivized to fold, spindle, and neutralize the scientific method:

There’s no shortage of warnings from the scientific community that science as we know it is being drastically affected by the commercial and institutional pressure to publish papers in high-profile journals – and now a new simulation shows that deteroriation actually happening.

To draw attention to the way good scientists are pressured into publishing bad science (read: sensational and surprising results), researchers in the US developed a computer model to simulate what happens when scientists compete for academic prestige and jobs.

In the model, devised by researchers at the University of California, Merced, all the simulated lab groups they put in these scenarios were honest – they didn’t intentionally cheat or fudge results.

But they received greater rewards if they published ‘novel’ findings – as happens in the real world. They also had to expend greater effort to be rigorous in their methods – which would improve the quality of their research, but lower their academic output.

“The result: Over time, effort decreased to its minimum value, and the rate of false discoveries skyrocketed,” lead researcher Paul Smaldino explains in The Conversation.

And what’s more, the model suggests that the ‘bad’ (if you will) scientists who take shortcuts in relation to the incentives on offer will end up passing on their methods to the next generation of scientists who work in their lab, creating in effect an evolutionary conundrum that the study authors call “the natural selection of bad science”.

“As long as the incentives are in place that reward publishing novel, surprising results, often and in high-visibility journals above other, more nuanced aspects of science, shoddy practices that maximise one’s ability to do so will run rampant,” Smaldino told Hannah Devlin at The Guardian.

This isn’t even remotely a surprise. Scientists are people and people respond to economic incentives. To claim that scientists are “trained”, so they won’t be tempted to put a thumb on the scale is absurd; accountants are trained to do math correctly too and that doesn’t seem to stop a few of them from somehow failing to make the numbers add up right from time to time.

And keep in mind this doesn’t even account for the known quantity of dishonest scientists. The model was created to determine the extent of the effects the perverse incentives are expected to have on honest scientists.

I know some people think it is bizarre that I distinguish between science and science, and even give the three different aspects three funny names, but how do you expect to fix a conflict of this sort if you can’t even distinguish between the two parties, let alone determine how one influences the other? Clarity in articulation is the first step in clear thinking.

Sweden stirs

Apparently it takes a gang rape of a handicapped woman to stir Swedes into considering the possibility that permitting Muslims to colonize them is a bad idea:

A wheelchair-bound woman was gang-raped by up to six migrants at a Swedish asylum centre after asking if she could use their toilet, it has been reported. The woman, in her 30s, was sharing a taxi home with a man after going in the medieval town of Visby on Sweden’s Gotland island when she asked to stop off. Her fellow passenger invited her inside before she was brutally set upon in the toilet, her lawyer said.

The assault sparked anger in the town and extra police were called to the island when an angry mob attacked the asylum centre with rocks.

The victim’s lawyer Staffan Freriksson said the abuse started in the toilet and several other men joined in. He added: ‘Where they came from we don’t know. This was going on for a couple of hours.’

Six men aged in their 20s were arrested in the days that followed they were later released. Sweden’s Expressen newspaper reported that the suspects were all asylum seekers and that the attack allegedly took place at asylum accommodation.

Diversity + Proximity = War. There will be no peace. There will be no integration. There are two choices: Submission or Reconquista.

I’ll have a review when I finish it, but one thing I’ve learned from Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order is that there is no chance – absolutely none – that people from kinship cultures can ever successfully integrate to the West in statistically significant numbers without totally destroying everything that is identifiably Western.

It’s not a genetic thing or even a cultural thing, it’s a fundamental philosophical hardwiring that no mere proposition or individual assimilation can possibly undo.

The Restoration of Ricky Vaughn

It will not be happening. Twitter has formally buried his account.

It’s strange, but no one who has participated in targeting me for abuse has ever had their account suspended, let alone deleted. This is why, if you’re on Twitter, it’s time to move over to Gab. Your days are numbered there anyhow. Consider the casualties:

  • Milo
  • Scott Adams
  • Instapundit
  • Vox Day
  • Ricky Vaughn

I guarantee you that every single one of those individuals were more sinned against than sinning. But that is the SJW tactic, to repeatedly hit you, then declare that you are not allowed to hit back. That’s not right.

Hit back. Join #TheDisconvergence. Sign up for Gab. Start using Infogalactic. Start using Brave. We’re going to foxnews these fuckers to oblivion, and you’re going to help us do it. There are tens of thousands of you who have read SJWs Always Lie, so you know what the stakes are. When I wrote about “taking down the Thought Police”, this is exactly what I anticipated.

If you’ve ever rolled your eyes about a biased entry on Wikipedia or censored yourself on Twitter or Facebook because you knew if you exposed what you really think you’d find yourself the subject of an SJW campaign, you’re one of us already. It’s time for all of us to take the offense for a change and let the thought police worry about us.

UPDATE: a skeptic is impressed by the team’s work so far, but is characteristically skeptical about our ability to keep it up. I think we’ll surprise him in the future, as we can certainly work more efficiently and effectively than we have to date.

As an observer of a number of tech startups, I’m impressed with how much he’s done to date with quite modest funding. My crude estimate is that he’s been operating at roughly ten times the normal projected effectiveness in coding and deployment…. I’ve looked closely at three proposals (and seen countless more) to replicate Wikipedia in some fashion that theoretically creates revenue. This is the best thought out, and the best executed to date. He’s spent about a tenth what the next best plan cost, and achieved results about 4 months faster. Technically I should rate that as better than ten times. I’m not sure how you wish me to spin that. Would you like me to lie and say he’s horrible in my judgement?

INFOGALACTIC NOTE: If you’ve requested an account already, please be patient. We want to get you approved and editing, but we’ve had to hold them up while we fix an astonishingly stupid “feature” that would automatically expose your real names. I know that people are skeptical that we can do what we’re planning to do; but trust me, you have no idea how inexplicably insane the tools we’re presently utilizing are. If they worked the way any competent team would have designed them, we’d be halfway into Phase Three already. To date we’ve spent far more time fixing the dysfunctional tools that are available than we have doing anything new, which is why we plan to entirely replace them with tools of our own design.

Seriously, I’ve never seen inside a project where so many obviously terrible decisions were made and baked into the cake. And I was brought in to help fix Age of Conan.

The doubters doubt

File 770ers respond to the announcement of Infogalactic:

Errrr, just how is Wikipedia troubled? is he conflating Wikipedia with Wikileaks which is a separate undertaking? And is he really stupid enough to think he can create an alternative to somethings that has over five million pages just in the English version?

MemoryAlpha has *just* forty thousand and its been around for over a decade.

The old Green Man Review which I run had roughly twenty thousand pages before we moved to WordPress and that took twenty years.

Fuck, this man is simply insane.

I love this stuff. In answer to her questions:

  1. Wikipedia is corrupt, incredibly outdated technologically, has betrayed its vision, is losing editors and admins at a rapid rate, and instantly reverts nearly one-third of its additions. Wikipedia’s active admins have been literally decimated from the time we started working on Infogalactic; I now have more VFM than Wikipedia has active admins. Infogalactic is not an alternative to Wikipedia, Infogalactic will replace Wikipedia in the same way Facebook replaced MySpace.
  2. No.
  3. We already have 11 million pages. Infogalactic will dwarf the English Wikipedia within 18 months of Phase Three going live.
  4. Vox’s First Law: any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

Canons 1 and 7 absolutely contradict each other, which is probably why they appear at either end of the spectrum. In a way, the canons encompass the “reality” of the entire endeavor.

There is no contradiction at all. Facts are facts. But what particular facts one editor chooses to emphasize, or deemphasize, in an article permits the presentation of entirely different perspectives on the same objective reality. For example, the LA Times poll today reports that Donald Trump is winning the election. The NBC News poll today reports that Hillary Clinton is winning the election. Both reports are indubitably facts. Which fact you choose to cite depends upon your perspective and paints a very different picture.

A subjective opinion is not the same as an objective fact.

Now matter how much I try and wrap my mind around what those words mean, the result is also ways the same:

ARISTOTLE! RHETORIC!

And that is precisely why we will have Context and Opinion sub-pages in Phase Two. This negative reaction on the part of the SF-SJWs is exactly what I’d hoped to see, because it tends to confirm that we are on the right track in taking back the cultural high ground. As for those claiming we “lifted” any content, I would merely observe that we have literally the exact same right to the content that Wikipedia does. The difference is that Wikipedia’s thought police are desperate to control that content and fit it to their narrative. We’re not, which is why we will inevitably win.

Wikipedia has lost the Mandate of Heaven. As a result, Infogalactic is going to become a top 100 Internet site en route to becoming The Planetary Knowledge Core. And it is going to do so faster than anyone likely believes possible. And no, I’m not bored with Castalia House at all. Quite to the contrary, Infogalactic is going to help Castalia House become the #1 publisher in science fiction and fantasy.

The five-phase Roadmap is only the beginning. That is far from the entirety of our vision, that’s all we’re willing to discuss publicly for now. Believe me, if you think what we’ve said so far is outlandish, you haven’t seen anything yet.

UPDATE: Breitbart readers are rather more enthusiastic:

Infogalactic, an online encyclopedia branding itself as a censorship free alternative to Wikipedia without “bias or thought police,” has launched.

The online encyclopedia that refers to itself as a “Planetary Knowledge Core™”  was conceived as a replacement for Wikipedia that promises to be free of the problems that have plagued Wikipedia such as the bureaucracy amongst editors, censorship of content, harassment, and vandalism of public figures’ pages.

Reforestation

The greening of Europe and the consequences thereof.

Within the last 100 years, Europe has experienced two World Wars, the end of communism, the emergence of the European Union and a series of other transformative political and economic developments. A team of scientists has now been able to visualize the impact of historical events in maps that show the growth and decline of settlements, forests and croplands.

The map, shown above, is the result of a research project led by Dutch scholar Richard Fuchs from the University of Wageningen. Besides regional political and economic trends, Europe’s landscape was shaped by several larger developments of the 20th century, according to Fuchs.

“More than 100 years ago, timber was used for almost everything: as fuel wood, for metal production, furniture, house construction. Hence, at around 1900 there was hardly any forest areas left in Europe. Especially after World War II, many countries started massive afforestation programs which are still running today,” Fuchs told The Washington Post.

As a result, Europe’s forests grew by a third over the last 100 years. At the same time, cropland decreased due to technological innovations such as motorization, better drainage and irrigation systems: Relatively fewer area was needed to produce the same amount of food. Furthermore, many people migrated from rural to urban areas, or overseas.

Fuchs’ fascinating conclusion: Forests and settlements grew at the same time and Europe is a much greener continent today than it was 100 years ago. A closer look at different regions and countries reveals Europe’s recovery from the deforestation of past centuries.

Now, I’m absolutely all for more trees and greener continents, but correct me if I’m wrong here. Since plants give off carbon dioxide, wouldn’t more trees tend to explain more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Yes, I know plants take in more than they give off, while they are alive, but then they release it all again when they die.

During their lifetimes, plants generally give off about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2), that they absorb, although this varies a great deal between different kinds of plants. Once they die, almost all of the carbon that they stored up in their bodies is released again into the atmosphere. 


I don’t believe global warming is good science, given its complete failure as a predictive model, but if we were to assume for the sake of argument that global warming exists and if it is the result of the greenhouse effect, wouldn’t greener continents be one of the obvious factors, however minor? Or does logging in the Amazon and Asia counterbalance more trees in Europe and North America?

Paul Ryan goes full-NeverTrump

It will be glorious when the Trumpslide upsets the applecarts of the GOP sellouts:

Speaker Paul Ryan told House Republicans on a conference call Monday morning that he’s done defending Donald Trump and will focus on maintaining his party’s increasingly imperiled House majority, according to sources on the call.The message amounted to a concession by the highest-ranking elected Republican that his nominee for president can’t win — and lawmakers should act accordingly to save themselves and preserve a Republican Congress to act as a check on Hillary Clinton.

I always told you they were the stupid faction of the bifactional Ruling Party. Now you know. Now everyone knows.