Dr. Pournelle health report

From Jerry’s blog:

    “Jerry had a small stroke. He is recovering well at a local hospital. Prognosis is good, though they’re running more tests and he’s expected to stay at least another day or two.

    “He felt well enough to call Mom [Mrs. Pournelle] from the hospital.

    “Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. More updates when we have them.”

They are permitting well-wishers to post comments, in case you would like to do so.

I can’t say I know Dr. Pournelle well, but after working with him over the last two weeks to get “His Truth Goes Marching On” and “Simulating the Art of War” into RIDING THE RED HORSE, I found myself marveling at how sharp he is despite being 81 years old. Of course, it probably helps when you’re starting with a mind that is around +4SD.

We did talk a little about the SFWA purge in passing; he was curious about my perspective on it. He was mildly appalled to hear what really happened, as you might expect, and thought the Board’s action was both ridiculous and short-sighted. But he also saw the humor in the incident, and laughed out loud when I explained the actual nature of the technical violation.

It’s such a pleasure to discover that a giant of one’s youth is also a genuinely good man. Here is to his speedy recovery.

Pity the poor troll

Poor Andrew Marston is sad that his trolling has rendered him unable to post things by people he likes, for fear that they’ll be treated the way he treats others.

I actually thought about linking to a video of Emma singing and playing
guitar. Don’t get me wrong, this has little to do with the elections, in
fact, I actually considered posting it the day after the election, but
then I found out Larry Correia and his poo-flingers are searching for
and conjecturing upon my posts elsewhere on the internet, and since
linking to a video of Emma by Emma could put us in a situation where
Correia or Vox could do a lot of damage, I am not linking to it.

Of course, there are a lot of things we could do. For one, we could let them know about how Andrew publicly bragged about posting pornography on the site of two underage girls:

If you had to confess to the most evil thing you have ever done, what would it be?

Yamamanama–I bet April Gaede knows the answer to that one… heh, heh… Oh yeah, Prussian Blue is on SomethingAwful. Lynx and Lamb’s diary was hacked or something, because it was overloaded with porn. Gay porn. Gay porn involving old people. Gay porn involving old white people. In response, April Gaede only allowed one character (!?) in the guestbook. In response to that, people made 42 posts with one character each.

Yamamanama–Child porn? Yeah, OK. I actually posted some examples of the stuff I spammed Micetrap Records with in that thread about Who Is White? 

He also goes by the name of yama the space fish. The guy is a certified nut case who posts porn all over the internet. I saw a few examples of his work on some WP sights before the mods had a chance to pull it off. He is one sick bastard. He posted a picture of children having sex on one sight,and another one of two elderly men having gay sex on another one. Then after they were removed he tried to say they were just pictures of a chineese girl in a bathing suit.

Andrew quite clearly doesn’t understand how “irritating people who can afford to pay for private detectives” works. Or that “annoying people with high-level connections at various Internet technology companies” is probably not a good idea. Or that all of that is completely irrelevant when he’s already posted so many names on his own site…. Andrew doesn’t really seem to understand how the Internet works. Now here is the punchline:

Andrew Marston aka Beardsley McTurbanhead
The fact that Blogspot turns a blind eye to your many harassment campaigns is sickening.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that comments on Silence Without have all
disappeared now that Steve Sailer, Vox Day, and Andrew Bolt have linked
to it.

You’re projecting there, Andrew. I’m not harassing anyone. One single link to a blog site in the news that specifically mentions me by name doesn’t qualify as harassment or trolling in anyone’s book. You, on the other hand, were known for harassing many people for years before you ever discovered this blog. Now, perhaps you have forgotten, but I am literally publishing the book on 4GW,  and as you should have learned from the example of McRapey, I may be slow to start, but once I get rolling, I never, ever stop.

Burning question: Who’s going to have a lot of explaining to do after I get off the phone with the police department? Child porn is not a joke to them.

A partial list of names: Alauda*, Arachnothera, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Chokley Carmichael,
Clamps*, Comrade Questions, Daphis, Daphnis*, Freddy Foreshadowing,
Luscinia*, Luscinia Hafez, Starshine, Sunlight, Will Le Fey*, Yama*,
Yamamanama*, Yama the Space Fish.

Counterparty risk

Robert Prechter warned of this. It doesn’t matter if you traded right, if you can’t cash in your nominal winnings:

Dear Client,

Please be advised that that most Western Banks have stopped pricing USD/RUB. As such, FXCM can no longer offer this instrument to our clients and will begin closing any existing client trades in USD/RUB effective at Noon EST today, December 16th, 2014, 

So for those curious why there appears to be a collapse in Ruble volatility in the past few hours which in turn has sent both stocks and crude soaring, the answer is simple: nobody is trading it! 

And this is what happened following the post: as soon as all those
short the RUB (long USDRUB) realized they have to take profits, the USDRUB tumbled some 500 pips (!) in the process sending stocks surging.

We appear to have a full-blown financial war underway. I wonder how long it will take Putin to put the ruble on the gold standard. That’s always been his trump card; it eliminates Russia’s ability to play the money multiplication game, but in the end, will provide Russia with a sounder currency than the so-called currency of last resort.

The randomness of scientistry

Science is finally turning scientody on scientistry… and the results are not as self-flattering to professional science as most scientists expected.

The NIPS consistency experiment was an amazing, courageous move by the organizers this year to quantify the randomness in the review process. They split the program committee down the middle, effectively forming two independent program committees. Most submitted papers were assigned to a single side, but 10% of submissions (166) were reviewed by both halves of the committee. This let them observe how consistent the two committees were on which papers to accept.  (For fairness, they ultimately accepted any paper that was accepted by either committee.)

The results were revealed this week: of the 166 papers, the two committees disagreed on the fates of 25.3% of them: 42. But this “25%” number is misleading, and most people I’ve talked to have misunderstood it: it actually means that the two committees disagreed more than they agreed on which papers to accept. Let me explain.

The two committees were each tasked with a 22.5% acceptance rate. This would mean choosing about 37 of the 166 papers to accept. Since they disagreed on 42 papers total, this means each committee accepted 21 papers that the other committee rejected and vice versa, for 21 + 21 = 42 total papers with different outcomes. Since they each accepted 37 papers, this means they disagreed on 21/37 ≈ 56% of the list of accepted papers.

In particular, 56% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second one and vice versa. In other words, most papers at NIPS would be rejected if one reran the conference review process (with a 95% confidence interval of 40-75%).

What rightly concerns the writer is the fact that a purely random process would have resulted in a 77.5 percent disagreement, which is closer to the 56 percent observed than the 30 percent expected. And, of course, the 0 percent that the science fetishists would have us believe is always the case.

This is a very important experiment, because it highlights the huge gap between science the process (scientody) and science the profession (scientistry). Some may roll their eyes at my insistence on using different words for the different aspects of science, but the observable fact, the scientodically informed fact, is that using the same word to refer to the two very differently reliable aspects of science is incredibly misleading.

Homeschool or Die: Pakistan

4GW prefers to aim at soft targets:

At least 126 people have been killed, more than 100 of them children, after Taliban gunmen stormed a military school in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, in the worst ever militant attack to hit the troubled region.

It was reported that one suicide bomber blew himself up in a room containing 60 children and a teacher was set on fire in front of pupils, with the children forced to watch.

The attack started with the gunmen, disguised as security guards, entering the 500-pupil school – which has students aged 10 to 18 – in the early hours.

The jihadists shot their way into the building and went from classroom to classroom, shooting at random.

Army commandos quickly arrived at the scene and exchanged fire with the gunmen. Eye-witnesses described how students cowered under desks as dead bodies were strewn along corridors. News images of the aftermath of the attack showed boys in blood-soaked school uniforms with green blazers being carried from the scene.

Around 160 children, aged 13 and 14, are being held hostage, with four gunmen still inside.  A police inspector said they had trapped the terrorists in the principal’s office. Many of the soldiers involved in the rescue operation are trying to save their own children.

And the world looks on… and learns. The strutting, swaggering militarized police in America have already seen their own families targeted in Los Angeles and Colorado, but they haven’t taken the lesson to heart yet and dialed down their confrontational tactics. And yet, how quickly the agents of the state stop strutting and swaggering when they finally grasp that their families are easily reached even when they live behind barricades and their children go to special schools protected with security guards….

It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and in the West, the sort of easily avoidable tragedy that will nevertheless come to West in time, as we have already seen in New York, London, Madrid, and Sydney.

There is one answer, and only one answer. Mass repatriation. If it is not enacted, then America, and England, and Italy, and Sweden, and Germany, and every other country in the West will see its children subjected to the same jihadist violence. The East does not, and never has, practice the formal Western way of war. And they will prefer to target the soft targets, the women and the children who are incapable of fighting back. Note that this sort of soft-targeting is the very subject addressed by my story, “A Reliable Source”, in RIDING THE RED HORSE.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,’ said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. ‘We want them to feel the pain.'” 

Speaking of soft targets: “Over 1,000 schools have been destroyed by the Pakistan Taliban since 2010.“

The answer is not to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. It is to send them back over there so we don’t have to fight them here.


UPDATE: Final count: “Nine Taliban terrorists attacked the Army
Public School in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar today,
slaughtering 132 children in the deadliest terrorist attack in the
nation’s history.”

Heroine of the pre-anti-backlash

Steve Sailer points out that the woman who is heroically declaring her support for Muslims in the wake of Muslims kidnapping and murdering white Australians is, to put it mildly, a mentally unstable, attention-seeking loon:

Below is the Australian Broadcasting Company’s interview with The Megaphone’s designated heroine of the unfortunate events in Sydney today in which two victims of a Muslim immigrant terrorist died.

But even before the murders actually happened, the media was moving on to the real story: its fears of a backlash against Muslims, and the one brave woman, Melbourne writer Tessa Kum, who courageously tweeted her opposition to this theoretical but widely hoped for / denounced backlash. 

What is particularly amusing is that this “Melbourne writer” is not merely a mentally unstable, attention-seeking loon, but an SJW of the SFWA variety. And, as we all figured was inevitable eventually, she’s been one of the first of them to turn on John Scalzi and attack him for his unbearable whiteness, his privilege, and his undeniable racism:

I also didn’t expect to see the white publishing scene – let’s call a turd a turd – take on my Shovel of Oh You Are So Right Tessa and start digging graves with it.

Suddenly, you’re all promoting Tricia Sullivan’s new book.

Solidarity is for white women, hey.

There’s John Scalzi over there, making a point of featuring Tricia Sullivan’s work, and making an even larger point of deleting comments that ‘drag in online drama from elsewhere’. You know John Scalzi, right? You guys fucking love him. He’s generally a beacon for progressive reasonableness, a vocal ally, decent writer and I’ve seen him dance. People like him. He’s a great guy. I’ve noticed that you, white person, are really championing him for his overt stance against G***rgater. He’s a rich white cishet man in a western country, he has privilege coming out the wooza, it’s ace to see him going in to bat against the G***rgaters.

Because doxxing is bad!

But not all doxxing!

(“Not all men!”)

Doxxing is okay if done to a PoC.

This is the message John Scalzi sends when he promotes the work of Tricia Sullivan. He has significant platform and volume and he ticks all the privilege boxes. The reach and impact of this message should not be dismissed or underestimated. It is tacit approval of her actions, taking the position that she should not be reproached but instead supported.

This lack of intersectionality undermines all the otherwise good work he has done. How can I take “We Need Diverse Books” seriously – which I really fucking want to, and do – when there are white feminists such as John Scalzi providing implicit support to a white woman who has shown not a moment of regret for what she has done to a person of colour?

I can’t…. What makes this racist is the simple fact that you, white person, have not done this to your own.

Jim Frenkle, Vox Day, Harlan Ellis, Will Shetterly. For fuck’s sake, how many decades did you let Frenkle prey in the scene before some young uppity voice of dissent forced your hand? You let him sexually assault people. You fucking enabled him for years. But he’s gone! you cry. We got rid of him! Your hand was fucking forced. You wouldn’t have done a thing if one of his victims hadn’t stuck her neck out to ‘make a fuss’. He would still be employed in a position of power in this field if it was left to you, white person. But we got Vox Day out of SFWA! Holy shit, how many years did that take too? How many mouthy PoC’s publicly pushing their dissent did it take for you act? Years. Decades. Remember Elizabeth Moon and Wiscon? How long did you ‘consider all sides of the story’? How slow were you to act? How, when discussing the making and maintaining of safe spaces, ‘fair’ is it to give the voice of the privileged equal consideration as that of the oppressed?

Fucking hypocrites.

It would be tremendously amusing to be able to see this woman’s face when someone informs her that I am a Native American of part-Mexican descent. The fact is that the only writer ever purged from SFWA was a PoC. How racist is that?

And I laughed out loud at this: “[John Scalzi] has privilege coming out the wooza.” If nothing else, this should inspire some amusingly desperate tweets as McRapey hastens to abase himself in penance for his continuing to play life on the easiest difficulty setting. That should be everyone’s standard rebuttal to Scalzi from now on. “Shut up, John, you have privilege coming out the wooza.”

But to return to the primary subject, this is why no amount of Muslim-hugging and anti-backlash propaganda is going to stop the backlash and eventual Reconquista 2.0: Up to 20 students dead and 500 taken hostage as Taliban gunmen storm military-run school in Pakistan. Beslan, coming to a public school in your country soon.

Trigger warning!

In which a USN Commander, RIDING THE RED HORSE contributor, and new Castalia House Associate comments on the new military science fiction anthology:

If having your assumptions challenged and your mind blown could upset your delicate little psyche, you’re gonna want to click away right now.

If harrowing scenes of speculative, futuristic combat or stories about the men and women who fight for something greater than themselves fill you with dread, flee from here.

If center-right positions, hard science, or frank discussions of our past mistakes and future concerns make you want to hide behind your momma’s petticoats, you’d best stick to your internet safe-zone with all countervailing opinions neatly blocked away.

If the phrase “Trigger Warning” is something you watch out for and is itself a potential trigger for bad-thought . . . yeah, I got a book you’re gonna want to avoid.

However, if you can handle it and are a fan of kick-ass science fiction, of near-prescient analysis on what our future holds, or of some of the best writing you’ll see all year by great authors both new and old, well, for you I have your new favorite book….

Read the rest of it there. What do I mean by “new Castalia House Associate”? What that means is that Thomas May’s very good first contact novel is now available in DRM-free EPUB and MOBI for Kindle format from the Castalia House store for $3.99. And by “first contact”, I should probably point out that I mean “violent space combat” with one of the most unusual alien races yet encountered in science fiction. If you enjoyed “Within This Horizon”, then you’re going to want to read A Sword Into Darkness.

The reaction to the new anthology has been almost uniformly positive, which is encouraging, but I have to say that I was probably most amused by these two comments at Instapundit’s.

  • Tom Kraman and Vox Day…lemme guess, more of that namby-baby, Dem/Lib/SJW kumbaya fluff… said no one ever.
  • Kratman AND Vox Day? Is the publisher TRYING to make SJW heads into IEDs?

The collection is Blue SF, to be sure, but it is moderately less Deep Navy Blue SF than you might expect, mostly because unlike the gatekeepers of Pink SF, Tom and I don’t believe in ruthlessly enforcing our ideological perspective on every contributor. As Larry Correia has gone to considerable pains to point out in the past, it is the story is the point, not the moral or the ideological object lesson. And the general conclusion appears to be that these are very good stories indeed.

When trends won’t hold

I think it is amusing that the U.S. Census Bureau still believes there will be a single political entity by 2044, let alone 2060.

New population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau show that whites will become a “minority” by 2044, replaced by a “majority” of minority groups, mostly blacks and Hispanics.

The new projections, analyzed in a Brookings Institution report, show the huge rise of Hispanics, projected to make up 25.1 percent of the U.S. population in 2044, double African-Americans.

According to the analysis, the white will make up 49.7 percent of the country in 2044, minorities the rest. What’s more, by 2060, whites will account for just 44 percent of the country.

Imagine what the economy of the USA is going to look like when the white population has been halved, mostly due to their replacement by those famously productive Hispanics…. The only thing that is keeping the country together at this point is that the white middle class is still doing just well enough to maintain hope that things are going to turn around eventually. Once that hope is entirely gone, they will be willing to begin taking the risks that they are presently unwilling to take.

The government’s primary means of control is based upon the threat of losing your job and your living standard. But once those things are already gone, there is nothing but raw physical force. And we know from 4GW theory how well force devoid of legitimacy and moral authority works in maintaining order.

Re-reporting

That must be one of the things they learn in journalism school. Despite being a three-times nationally syndicated columnist with Chronicle Features and Universal Press Syndicate, I am unfamiliar with the term:

Kathryn Hendley, Alex Stock and Ryan Duffin—the three friends of Jackie’s who Sabrina Rubin Erdely falsely claimed discouraged from her calling the authorities—now tell the AP that they have all been contacted by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who is “re-reporting” her original story.

This is a bizarre idea for a number of reasons.

First, Rubin Erdely herself continues to refuse to talk to the press—or, as she said of the UVa administration, she is “stonewalling.” So she is a hypocrite.

And second—why on earth would anyone talk to her? (The AP story does not disclose whether the three friends agreed to be re-interviewed interviewed.) She revealed her profound political bias in her first article, as well as a fatal lack of professionalism. She might improve on the second part, but she’s unlikely to change the first. In fact, she might be even more invested in proving the point that, whatever happened to Jackie, there is a larger “rape culture” at the University of Virginia.

Question: how does this woman still have a job at Rolling Stone? How is it possible that they haven’t fired her yet?