Bulgaria defends its border

It’s about time Europe started defending its borders. Think about how many lives would have been saved if the Greek and Italian navies had simply sunk the first 20 boats that attempted to cross the Mediterranean:

An Afghan man was killed after police officers fired warning shots during scuffles on the border with Turkey, when a bullet is said to have ricocheted, the Guardian reports.

The man was shot trying to cross into Bulgaria from Turkey late on Thursday and died on his way to hospital, the interior ministry has said.

“A big group of illegal migrants attempted to enter Bulgaria from Turkey. One man suffered a gunshot wound in the incident and died on the way to hospital,” an interior ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

The incident happened near the south-eastern Bulgarian town of Sredets on Thursday evening, she said, adding that the dead man was from Afghanistan.

If the migrants are not sent back soon, many more of them are going to die this summer. The EU is cracking apart and Europe’s sympathy is entirely tapped out.

Bailouts are for the banks

Not for the little people:

Believe it or not, the US Marshals Service in Houston is arresting people for not paying their outstanding federal student loans.

Paul Aker says he was arrested at his home last week for a $1500 federal student loan he received in 1987. He says seven deputy US Marshals showed up at his home with guns and took him to federal court where he had to sign a payment plan for the 29-year-old school loan.

Congressman Gene Green says the federal government is now using private debt collectors to go after those who owe student loans.

I suspect Donald Trump is the only reason the USA is not entering a revolutionary environment. But even with Trump, one more round of bank bailouts should do it.

Obama makes a list

He’s getting ready for the Supreme Court appointment battle in the Senate:

Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.”

Sources later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

In related news, Majority Leader “Vichy” Mitch McConnell refused to reveal his plans for the upcoming Republican surrender in the Senate. “We haven’t decided exactly how, or how fast, we’re going to collapse,” the U.S. Senator from Kentucky said. “Perhaps just a few of us will bravely cross the aisle and join the Democrats in supporting whatever illiterate, homeless person of color is put up for the Court by the President, or maybe we’ll go all in and stab the grass roots in the back en masse. We’re still working out the strategy.”

When asked if he, personally, had held the pillowcase over the late Justice Scalia’s face, Sen. McConnell shook his head before replying, “No comment.”

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.