Cuckoo for peer review

Scientistry at its finest:

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources. “As scientists, we’re aware of the top-tier journals in our specific sub-field, but even we cannot always pinpoint if a journal in another field is real or not,” Shrime says. “For instance, the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is the very first journal I was ever published in and it’s legitimate. But the Global Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is fake. Only someone in my field would know that.”

You can trust scientists. Because global warming. And they have proven that birds are, indeed, cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F 2

It was rather amusing to see some people attempting to shake off yesterday’s post on the decline in science fiction by pointing to the fact that overall print fiction had declined 8 percent, so the 7 percent decline in science fiction meant that the genre was actually outperforming. Never mind the fact that it had declined 21 percent the year before…. and after a little more research, I discovered that it had declined 21 percent the year before that as well.

In fact, SF print sales are now about half what they were in 2008. I don’t place TOO much confidence in this chart, because it shows around 4 million in 2012, whereas the PW numbers indicate they should be around 5.6 million. But it does suffice to indicate that what we are witnessing is a pretty serious trend and one that involves more than the mere shift to ebooks.

A decline from a combined 26 million in print sales to 12.7 million in only five years is bordering on the cataclysmic; remember, ebooks eliminate any need for the expensive structure of the mainstream genre publishers, a fact that has probably not escaped the owners of Tor and other imprints. I’ll put together some charts once I get some better numbers, but the point is that the anecdotal evidence of people increasingly avoiding the Pink SF produced by the self-appointed gatekeepers is supported by the data trend.

Abolishing the Air Force

Jerry Pournelle wants to get rid of the Air Force:

I also intend to do an essay on why we should abolish the Air Force
and return to an Army Air Force which is not a separate service. The
purpose of military forces is to win wars. The purpose of the Air Force
is—well, they no longer know. When we had SAC we knew – “Our profession
is peace” was not just a slogan – but that too is neglected in the
Modern Air Force. Deterrence and maintenance of nuclear weapons, being
ready to use weapons when your fondest wish is that they will never be
used – that does require a different kind of military. We once had that
in SAC but the end of the Cold War was the end of SAC, and the nuclear
deterrence force is, well not what it once was. It is subject to the
Iron Law now.

As to the rest of the Air Force, it is more interested in the Air
Force than winning wars, and considers supporting the field army as
beneath contempt. A slow old Warthog does a much better job, but there
is no glory in that. Best to use fast jets… which of course are
imprecise and cause a lot of collateral damage. Everyone knows that a
force of propeller driven P-47 fighters of WWII would be more effective
for supporting the field army than what we use. And the Army must be
crippled, not allowed to have effective air power in taking territory.
You must use modern jets at high speed.

Now the Air Force has a mission that the Army at present does not
have: Air Supremacy. And that is a different mission from supporting the
field army. It involves engagements with Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs)
as well as strikes against the enemy base of operations. The glory is
in air to air combat, but that is not the effective way to air
supremacy.

That is the main argument for an “Independent Air Force” and the
bitter fights that ended with creation of USAF. It is true, ground army
commanders tend to select the wrong targets to sortie against, and
endanger air supremacy; thus the argument for independence, which USAAF
eventually won (before SAC existed or any but a few knew would be
needed.) Hiroshima ended the debate. But now the Cold War ended and USAF
killed SAC as not glamorous – not career building any longer. As to the
Warthogs, give them to the National Guard! Real pilots don’t need them!

Sure, I exaggerate but not much: the Air Force keeps trying to get
rid of the Warthogs, but never by giving them (and the ground support
mission) to the War Department. Better that GI’s die than USAF give up a
mission even though it does not want it.

Drones will change all this, but why wait?

Actually, as Eric S. Raymond demonstrated in both “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”, the Air Force is very close to obsolete anyhow. My expectation is that they’ll try to survive by moving their mission upward, to space, in order to compensate for the vanishing ability of their planes to survive in the atmosphere.

A proper Hobbit

TolkienEditor has cut Peter Jackson’s abusive monstrosity in half and thereby, in large part, restored Tolkien’s much-beloved tale:

I decided to condense all three installments (An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies) into a single 4-hour feature that more closely resembled Tolkien’s original novel. Well, okay, it’s closer to 4.5 hours, but those are some long-ass credits! This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts, detailed below:

The investigation of Dol Guldor has been completely excised, including the appearances of Radagast, Saruman and Galadriel. This was the most obvious cut, and the easiest to carry out (a testament to its irrelevance to the main narrative). Like the novel, Gandalf abruptly disappears on the borders of Mirkwood, and then reappears at the siege of the Lonely Mountain with tidings of an orc army.

The Tauriel-Legolas-Kili love triangle has also been removed. Indeed, Tauriel is no longer a character in the film, and Legolas only gets a brief cameo during the Mirkwood arrest. This was the next clear candidate for elimination, given how little plot value and personality these two woodland sprites added to the story. Dwarves are way more fun to hang out with anyway. 😛

The Pale Orc subplot is vastly trimmed down. Azog is obviously still leading the attack on the Lonely Mountain at the end, but he does not appear in the film until after the company escapes the goblin tunnels (suggesting that the slaying of the Great Goblin is a factor in their vendetta, as it was in the novel).

I was pleased to learn that in addition to getting rid of “Tauriel”, the ridiculous barrel-fight is also gone. The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit is a 6GB MP4 file, available by either torrent or direct download. Not all of Jackson’s egregious stupidities have been excised, but most of them have been surgically removed.

UPDATE: Another, even more reduced option:

After about 312 new edits and cuts and almost 5 hours removed
from the trilogy, this single film combines the three Peter Jackson
movies into one immense epic that accurately tells the story of Bilbo,
while maintaining what new ideas and battles have been implanted in
Jackson’s retelling (such as the Battle of the Five Armies containing
orcs instead of goblins). 

The following is a list of all the major
edits/alterations to the films for this single edit. Scenes aren’t
always simply removed, sometimes they are repositioned or sometimes
specific elements are taken out or added in for coherency or pacing:  
  • Removed all of Elf-Dwarf Love Triangle Plot
  • Removed all of Gandalf’s necromancer adventures
  • Removed most of orc scenes/battles/mentions in first 2/3’s of
    the film (including removing frames with orcs from the post-goblin
    escape scene at the end of “Unexpected Journey”)
  • Removed Bilbo killing a wolf – the first thing he kills is the spider in Mirkwood forest, giving the sword the name “Sting”
  • Removed all of (elder) Bilbo’s introduction to the lore
  • Removed all of the heavy foreshadowing for LOTR and the evil of the ring – kept to the spirit of the book, it was a playful invisibility ring!
  • Added a deleted scene of the Shire villagers as an intro to the film
  • Reduced much of the Dwarves’ dinner at Bilbo’s
  • Created faster transition to Bilbo getting out of the house
  • Reduced Rivendell
  • Reduced Stone Giant scene
  • Reduced goblin scene, re-ordered dialogue to mirror book interactions between Thorin & Goblin King
  • Kept Gollum scene entirely intact – no cutting between that
    and the goblin lair, although shortened as well as removed Gollum
    beating the corpse in the beginning
  • Created voice-over transition into Beorn scene at the beginning of “Desolation of Smaug”
  • Reduced Mirkwood forest & Woodland Realm capture scenes
  • Heavily reduced Laketown capture (all of Laketown is about 10 minutes total now)
  • Removed Smaug battle scene with dwarves in the mines (kept
    Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, the battle was outrageously cartoonish
    and long)
  • Removed Bard using his son as a bow, the shots dance around it and the scene is intact 
  • Rearranged much of Battle of Five Armies for coherency of
    Bilbo concealing and giving away the Arkenstone without the need for so
    many silly slow-motion Thorin bits
  • Removed many elements of the Battle of Five Armies that
    contained too much CGI monsters or silly battle actions (like repeated
    head-butting) 
  • Reduced and rearranged the battle to get to Thorin quicker
  • Removed elves from the final fight scene (Kili fights the orc in order to protect Bilbo instead of his elf love interest)
  • Removed final flash-forward scene, the film ends with Bilbo finally coming home

Stop the Ensaddening!

Larry Correia explains the vital importance of joining the Crusade to End Puppy Related Sadness and getting a supporting membership to vote in the nominations. Because only you can tie SJWs to stakes and burn them.

Now our SP3 spokesmanatee would like to share a few thoughts about
why it is so important that you help to combat the scourge of PRS.



wendell2 (2)

Thank you, Wendell. That was so profound I may have shed a single manly tear.


This year we will be expanding the suggested slate to include several
other authors, artists, and creators who are usually locked out by the
SJW voting block. 

(sniff) Damn, but Wendell is one eloquent manatee, isn’t he? You just can’t argue with that. Keep in mind that you’ll get a bunch of ebooks for your $20/year membership (you pay $40 for two years), and the more nominations Sad Puppies gets, the better the books you’ll get will be. Last year voters got the complete set of The Wheel of Time as well as all three volumes of Larry’s Grimnoire trilogy; which was pretty good value for the $20.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F

Publisher’s Weekly reports on the growth or decline of various categories in 2014:

Adult Fiction (unit sales, in thousands)
Genre20132014% change
Classics7,8177,578-3%
Fantasy8,6157,526-13%
Graphic Novels7,6598,66913%
Mystery/Detective14,88414,304-4%
Science Fiction4,4484,142-7%

Remember, science fiction was also down 21% in 2013, which means that science fiction unit sales have declined 1,488,000 in just two years. It’s down more than one-quarter in two years and is now only half the size of the Graphic Novel market, which is not only growing, but is presently dominated by men writing and drawing for male customers.

The “women destroy science fiction” meme isn’t even remotely ironic. Women, and the gamma males who cater to them, are literally destroying the adult science fiction and fantasy markets.

To put it in perspective, ONE edition of one of my games sold more copies than the ENTIRE science fiction market sold in print last year.

The face of the Devil

The Church of England is marking a new era in its history as the Rev Libby Lane becomes the first woman to be ordained as a bishop. More than 100 members of the episcopate from England and other parts of the worldwide Anglican Church will lay hands on the 48-year-old vicar from Hale, Greater Manchester, to formally consecrate her during a service at York Minster. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu will anoint her with oil in an ancient tradition tracing its origins to the prophets of the Old Testament.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, will also be present, alongside female bishops from churches in other parts of the world.

The consecration marks the conclusion of a decades-long wrangle over the role of women in leadership in the established Church, the last great institution of British public life to open itself to full gender equality.

Does that look like someone who is sobered by the burden of assuming spiritual leadership? Or the smirking triumph of someone who has finally managed to corrupt a once-great institution?

As the Church of England finally succumbs to its entryist invaders, we can safely predict that the church leaders will be disappointed in their expectations: “Church leaders hope it will mark a moment of reconciliation between
traditionalists and reformers on the issue.”

It won’t. It marks the death knell of the Church of England. The “new era” that is marked is the end.

The real fear of the Eurocrats

Daniel Hannan observes that it isn’t a Greek bankruptcy that would be the real catastrophe as far as the EU is concerned:

A default and devaluation would offer a fresh start. Although the economy has been pummelled by six years of Euro-austerity, some of the fundamentals have improved. The bureaucracy has been slimmed, taxes are now collected and, if debt repayments were taken out of it, the budget would be in balance. In truth, this is what EU leaders fear. Not that Greece will leave the euro and collapse, but that Greece will leave the euro and prosper.

A competitive Greek economy, exporting its way back to growth, might inspire Spaniards and Italians, who have also been paying the price of the euro, to follow. For those Eurocrats who see the single currency as a component of political integration, that prospect is too horrible to contemplate.

We’ve been here before. Two years ago, when it looked as if Cyprus might leave the euro, Brussels went so far as to lift money directly out of private bank accounts to pay off the country’s creditors.

The extreme measure was necessary, the European Central Bank admitted, ‘to prevent worries over the reversibility of the euro resurfacing’.

I observe that Iceland, which rejected the EU’s bank-first dictates, is doing considerably better than Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, which obediently followed the EU’s instructions. I tend to doubt this observation has escaped the new Greek government.

Be the dragon

At Alpha Game, I comment upon the importance of being the dragon, not the self-styled paladin and self-appointed dragon-slayer. But one part of the Loneliest Paladin’s twitterstorm was relevant here for its illustration of rabbitology:

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Things I don’t get: why Ghaters would rally around Vox Day. Dude is the epitome of loser.

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Not only did Vox get kicked out of SFWA for being a racist homophobic sexist dipshit, he took sixth place on a five person ballot.

Note that insufficient popularity with a small and specific group is equated with being “the epitome of loser”… by someone with no friends and not much of a life. Success, in the rabbit’s world, is something that depends entirely upon the level of acceptance by the warren. Everything else is irrelevant.

Rabbits don’t understand that wolves respect strength and loyalty, even when exhibited in causes of no interest to them. Rabbits fear strength and have no loyalty, so the concepts are alien to them. They genuinely can’t understand the concept of standing up for someone because that someone stood up for you, even if you don’t like him, respect him, or want anything to do with him. For all that they are herd animals, they are not team players; in their own way they are more ruthlessly self-serving than the most ideological self-sovereign libertarian.

And speaking of rabbitology, see how the rabbits cry when their warrens are invaded and they learn they don’t possess the power they flaunted so foolishly:

GamerGate set out to writes its own story in Wikipedia – and to spread the dirt about the women who were its targets. These efforts were blocked by established editors under established Wikipedia policy. In retaliation, GamerGate planned an operation to get rid of its opponents – the “Five Horsemen” active in preserving objectivity and in keeping scurrilous sexual innuendo out of the encyclopedia. As a side-game, GamerGate also launched efforts to promote the idea that “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy of some Jewish academics to control the media.

The original GamerGate operation targeted the “five horsemen:” Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. All were sanctioned in the draft decision.

For months, these Wikipedia pages have been an escalating scene of daily – indeed hourly – conflict.

The Purge

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

No sanctions at all were proposed against any of GamerGate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned. The administrator who wrote, regarding Zoe Quinn’s sexual history, that

    I know other other allegations exist but will not state what those on WP are because that would be a BLP violation at the current time.

was not even mentioned. The many brand-new accounts who arrived in December with no Wiki experience, but possessing a curiously detailed knowledge of Wikipedia policy jargon, are unmentioned, save for the fact that the decision rests almost entirely on their proposals.

The extensive evidence of off-site collusion, which Wikipedia considers so improper that evidence must not be discussed on wiki but rather submitted in confidence, appears to have been entirely ignored. (I submitted such evidence myself, but received no acknowledgment or thanks; I have been told that much additional evidence was submitted.)

Notice how the upset rabbit appeals to “established editors and established policy” (better described as activist editors and self-imposed customs), despite the fact that the editors concerned were quite clearly VIOLATING Wikipedia policy, and doing so rather egregiously. What appears to have happened is that Wikipedia is finally beginning to act against the SJW thought police who make a practice of attempting to define the public narrative by exerting personal ownership over particular pages of interest.

Grexit looms

Election results in Greece don’t bode well for the Eurocrats:

Catastrophe’ warning as anti-austerity party looks set to win Greek election with up to 38 per cent of the vote. Exit poll shows 36 to 38 per cent for anti-austerity party Syriza. Ruling New Democracy party predicted to receive 26 to 28 per cent. Syriza set to win 148 to 154 seats – and it needs 151 to rule outright. In third place is ultra right-wing party Golden Dawn on up to 7 per cent.

Not a bad result for Golden Dawn considering that their leadership is in jail on what look like suspiciously trumped up charges.