#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I have a job opening for an engineer or CompSci in Idaho and am hoping
you will pass it along to the Dread Ilk. The job involves analyzing the
strengths and weaknesses of patents, technical papers, and the like.
If you are interested and would like to be contacted regarding this job, send me an email with IDAHO in the subject and I will pass it along to the relevant member of the Dread Ilk.
I said it would take 24 hours for any indisputably factual information added to the Wikipedia page about me to be removed by Wikipedia’s political commissars. It actually took all of 26 hours and 21 minutes to have my views on economics and the fact of Psykosonik’s four Billboard-charting club hits to be removed by one Hullaballoo Wolfowitz, who is the self-appointed left-wing policeman determined to keep the page as negative and fact-free as possible.
That being said, I can see that those who were trying to edit the page and make it more factual made several errors that the more experienced Wikipedia editor utilized to his advantage. For example, the citation of the four Billboard hits was not changed from the original citation that mentioned only two, thereby permitting Hullaballoo Wolfowitz the excuse to claim that the information was false and needed to be reverted.
When playing the Game of Wikipedia, one cannot merely add the information on a contested site, one must also support every single statement with a correct citation. Moreover, the editors missed the opportunity to strip out all of the nominally negative “facts” that are based on the “unreliable source” of this blog, such as this:
Beale is opposed to feminism[22] and female suffrage, writing that “I consider women’s rights to be a disease that should be eradicated.”[23]
Always look at the citations. If it’s this blog or WND, you can “unreliable source” it and strip it out.
UPDATE: In case you truly didn’t believe John Scalzi thinks like a girl:
John Scalzi @scalzi
The hilarious irony of someone who goes out of his way to try to
irritate me complaining that he’s best known for trying to irritate me.John Scalzi @scalzi
Pro tip: If you’re best known for annoying people, you only have your own life choices to blame.
Translation: There is one Wikipedia editor gatekeeping the page about me. There is another Wikipedia editor gatekeeping the page about him. Therefore, the narrative controlled by all of two people defines reality. It would be amusing that John thinks a three-time nationally syndicated columnist and founder of a four-time Billboard charting band is chiefly known for annoying him, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t believe that at all. It’s just his usual passive-aggressive snark.
This demonstrates the essence of the Gamma delusion. So long as you can convince just one other person of your version reality, it must be real. The fact is that I’ve already passed up the blog that he once claimed was his legacy. Everything else in due time.
Possibly on a wall of water:
Sunni militants from the Islamic State group on Thursday seized Iraq’s largest dam, placing them in control of enormous power and water resources and access to the river that runs through the heart of Baghdad. After a week of attempts, the armed gunmen successfully stormed the Mosul Dam and forced Kurdish forces to withdraw from the area, residents living near the dam told The Associated Press.
The Islamic State group posted a statement online Thursday, confirming that they had taken control of the dam and vowed to continue “the march in all directions,” adding that it not give up the “great Caliphate project.” The statement could not be verified but it was posted on a site frequently used by the group.
“The Mosul dam is now under Islamic State control,” Hisham al-Brefkani, a member of the Nineveh provincial council, said in a phone interview. “We call on the United Nations, the Security Council, the U.S. and the European Union to help.”
A dam employee, who was on site and asked that his name be withheld for safety reasons, confirmed that Islamic militants had overrun the installation.
It looks as if within a week, ISIS will control the two largest dams in Iraq if it can take control of the Haditha dam as well. They’ve already used flooding as a weapon, and it is reported that “Mosul could be completely flooded within hours and a 15-foot wall of water could crash into Baghdad.”
I doubt ISIS will try to drown Mosul and Baghdad as long as it looks like they’re winning, but this could mean serious problems even if someone in Iraq manages to get their act together and defeat them.
I had to laugh at Michael Ledeen’s take on the rise of the Caliphate. “When you ponder President Obama’s decision to (maybe) intervene against
ISIS in Iraq, keep in mind that such a move would please Tehran. At
least for the moment.”
Sure, Mr. “Faster, Please”, the Iraqi invasion is turning out so well, obviously the US should have invaded Iran too. Ledeen even tries to blame Iran for ISIS’s success; never mind the fact that they are predominantly armed with weapons supplied by the USA. Rather like the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and we all know how well that turned out.
A former advocate of assisted suicide warns of the consequences:
Legalising assisted suicide is a slippery slope toward widespread killing of the sick, MPs and peers were told yesterday. A former euthanasia supporter warned of a surge in deaths if Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’
His native Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, has seen deaths double in just six years and this year’s total may reach a record 6,000…. Professor Boer, who is an academic in the field of ethics, had argued seven years ago that a ‘good euthanasia law’ would produce relatively low numbers of deaths. But, speaking in a personal capacity yesterday, he said he now believed that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure. A ‘slippery slope’ for assisted dying in Britain would mean that euthanasia would follow the same path as abortion, which was legalised in 1967. There are now nearly 200,000 terminations a year.
Note that in Holland, “assisted suicide” rapidly transformed into “doctors killing infants”. Assisted suicide is for cowards anyhow; it is only sought by those who don’t have the courage or the decency to kill themselves, but want to offload the moral burden onto someone else. Not that I don’t understand those who don’t wish to suffer through a lingering and painful death. If I ever had a terminal disease, I’d probably want to end it quickly myself, in a room full of my enemies, surrounded by fifty pounds of high explosive.
But I have a simple and just solution. Just make advocating assisted suicide a capital crime punishable by hanging. That way there is no risk of a slippery slope leading to the murder of innocent children and cowards like that old fraud Terry Pratchett will obtain the death at someone else’s hands they are seeking.
Apparently Mr. Hitler just needed better marketing. Had he simply utilized the term “Unterstütztfreitod” instead of “Endlösung” and been careful to get signatures from each individual boarding a train, he would be a modern hero.
I thought this passage by Max Hastings about Archduke Franz Ferdinand was interesting for several reasons:
The Archduke’s political and social views were conservative and vigorously expressed. After attending Edward VII’s 1910 funeral in London, he wrote home deploring the boorishness of most of his fellow sovereigns, and the alleged impertinence of some politicians present, notable among them ex-US president Theodore Roosevelt. It is sometimes suggested that Franz Ferdinand was an intelligent man. Even if this was so, like so many royal personages into modern times, he was corrupted by position, which empowered him to express opinions unenlightened even by contemporary standards.
He loathed Hungarians, telling the Kaiser: ‘the so-called noble, gentlemanly Magyar is a most infamous, anti-dynastic, lying, unreliable fellow’. He regarded southern Slavs as sub-humans, referring to the Serbians as ‘those pigs’. He hankered after recovering Lombardy and Venetia, lost to Italy in his lifetime, for the Hapsburg Empire. Visiting Russia in 1891, Franz Ferdinand declared that its autocracy offered ‘an admirable model’. Tsar Nicholas II recoiled from Franz Ferdinand’s intemperance, especially on racial matters. Both the Archduke and his wife were strongly Catholic, favouring Jesuits and professing hostility towards Freemasons, Jews and liberals. Such was Sophie’s religious fervour that in 1901 she led two hundred fashionable women on a Catholic march through Vienna.
The Archduke nonetheless cherished one prudent conviction: while many Austrians, notably including army chief of staff Gen. Conrad von Hötzendorf, detested Russia and welcomed the prospect of a battlefield showdown with the Tsar, Franz Ferdinand dissented. He was determined, he said repeatedly, to avoid a clash of arms. Desiring a ‘concord of emperors’, he wrote: ‘I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria and Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Habsburgs – or perhaps the overthrow of both.’
He once wrote to Berchtold: ‘Excellency! Don’t let yourself be influenced by Conrad – ever! Not an iota of support for any of his yappings at the Emperor! Naturally he wants every possible war, every kind of hooray! rashness that will conquer Serbia and God knows what else … Through war he wants to make up for the mess that’s his responsibility at least in part. Therefore: let’s not play Balkan warriors ourselves. Let’s not stoop to this hooliganism. Let’s stay aloof and watch the scum bash in each other’s skulls. It’d be unforgivable, insane, to start something that would pit us against Russia.’
I find it remarkable that 100 years later, so many people are still more troubled by the idea that one man might consider a group of people to be scum than by the deaths of tens of millions. The notion that progressive politics and equalitarian sensibilities somehow equate to world peace, or even regional peace, simply do not stand up to historical scrutiny.
That “nonetheless” is false. Hastings fails to see the connection between Ferdinand’s racial intemperance and his reluctance to go to war, just as today’s multiculturalists and diversity advocates fail to see how their policies are leading to bloodshed that may make the trenches of World War I look mild in comparison.
It is the idea of inevitable progress that has reliably led to these massive blood-spillings. One notes that presently, in America, it is the neocons and the left-liberals who are keen to start a war with Russia, ignoring the mistakes made by the archduke’s peers a century ago.
I thought it might be useful to have a single place where confirmed IQs of various individuals can be listed. With the exception of the estimate for Barack Obama (whose IQ can only be estimated due to his refusal to release his academic records), only reliably reported IQs based on objective measures should be listed here; remember that the PSAT/SAT only served as an IQ proxy until 1994 and cannot be used to estimate IQ after that date. An IQ score with a plus sign after it indicates a known minimum IQ for the individual. A minus score indicates a known ceiling.
Also keep in mind that various awards and membership in various groups have direct IQ implications. Anyone in Mensa has a 132+ IQ. A perfect pre-1994 SAT score indicates a 168+ IQ. Anyone who is not a National Merit Semifinalist has an IQ below 140. Anyone who is not a National Merit Outstanding Participant has an IQ below 130.
168+ Paul Allen, Microsoft founder
168 Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army general
167 Bill Gates, Microsoft founder
166 James Woods, actor
160 Rush Limbaugh, broadcaster
151 Vox Day, game designer
140+ Hillary Clinton, U.S. senator
140+ PZ Myers, science blogger
140 John C. Wright, author
140 Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy
138 David Robinson, NBA
134 Al Gore, U.S. Vice-President
133 John McCain, U.S. senator
127 George W. Bush, U.S. President
123 John Kerry, U.S. senator
123 Richard Feynman, physicist
116 Barack Obama, U.S. President
103 Bill Bradley, U.S. senator
If you know of sources showing the IQs of other public figures, please put them in the comments along with the relevant citation or a link to the source. This is not for the discussion of the IQ scores of any non-public figures, so please resist the urge to talk about yourself as any such comments will be deleted.
It is richly ironic that Jimmy Wales, of all people, is complaining about the EU laws suppressing the truth on the Internet:
Speaking at Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales said: “History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.
“I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That’s history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that’s deeply immoral.”
I can’t think of any non-state organization that suppresses the truth as much as Wikipedia. The system that Wales has set up ruthlessly and relentlessly suppresses the truth under its false rubric of requiring a “reliable source”.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Wikipedia page about me. Does that describe my views at all? Are the totality of my views really limited to little more than a feud with John Scalzi and my expulsion from SFWA? Do I have no opinions on economics, politics, philosophy, literature, and religion despite having written books on the former and the latter? It’s telling, too, to observe that if the so-called feud and the expulsion are the only significant aspects of my views, there is no mention of the connection between the former and the latter.
Now, here are my views on the various schools of economics:
The Austrian school of economics presently provides Man’s best understanding of the field of economics, but the core mechanism for its business cycle is incorrect. In place of the shift between consumer goods and capital goods, it is the limits of demand for credit that is the causal factor of the boom-bust cycle.
Those are my actual views on the subject. That is the absolute truth. Post them on Wikipedia and they’ll be suppressed within 24 hours even though most of my other “views” are directly taken from the “reliable source” that is my own writing.
UPDATE: Speaking of the so-called feud, I thought this Twitter exchange between one ClarkHat and John Scalzi was illuminating. McRapey clearly doesn’t grasp (or more likely, being a gamma male, is unable to publicly admit), that he is a successful, but mediocre SF writer, not even when his book was picked up for a television series by the distinguished network famous for Sharknado and Werewolves vs Strippers:
CLARKHAT: Would you care to actually respond to my comments that 1) your writing is mediocre 2) your rewards >> your merit
JOHN SCALZI: Sure: 1. You’re wrong, 2. You’re wrong but even if you were right so what? Hope that helps.
CH: suggests a theory I hadn’t considered: you really DON’T understand the delta between your work & great work
JS: Your problem is you have really no understanding of my psychology. Which is fine, but doesn’t make you less wrong. I don’t mind you being wrong, however, as it has no effect on what I do or how I do it. Go on being wrong!
You and I have no disagreement in you sharing your thoughts on what is great writing. Do! I think that’s a fine thing.
CH: But this is again Blue Model reframing: “your thoughts”. My pt is not about “my truth”; it is about objective artistic truth. I am not saying “**I** prefer Mieville over @scalzi”; I am saying “objective standards exist; try some Mieville”.
JS: “Objective artistic truth.” Ooooh, I have the giggles now. DO GO ON.
CH: “You think Davinci’s David is better than my paper mache puppet of Donald Trump? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
JS: This objective art hypothesis of yours is ADORABLE. And explains many things, i.e., “What I like is OBJECTIVELY great, so there.”
That’s the amusing thing about McRapey. For all his vaunted rhetorical skills granted by virtue of BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he doesn’t grasp that he can’t assert that ClarkHat is wrong about him being a mediocre writer while simultaneously denying the concept of objective standards in art.
If all art is subjective, then Scalzi is a mediocre writer by virtue of ClarkHat subjectively declaring him to be so. And if all art is objective, then he is a mediocre writer by virtue of the comparison of his work with that of other, better writers. There is no way that Scalzi can correctly declare ClarkHat to be wrong, as he nevertheless repeatedly does.
A female journalist gets a bigger story than she bargained for:
The woman was reporting on illegal immigration from France to Britain and police believe the attack was carried by some of the men she intended to write about in the northern France port.
Detectives described the attack as being of a “particularly brutal nature”….
The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was described as “a London student who had travelled to France to highlight problems surrounding clandestine immigration.”
I have little sympathy for this woman, and none at all if she fails to honestly tell her fellow Brits about what happened to her at the hands of these poor immigrants who are just seeking a better life in Britain. This is why: “this is believed to be the first time that a journalist trying
to highlight their plight has been attacked.”
If the damned pro-immigration press would be more honest about the terrible cost of immigration to the native population, I tend to doubt she would have traveled there to “highlight their plight” in the first place.
First, I will note that the IDF estimates concerning the difficulty of conquering and de-militarizing Gaza were not dissimilar to my own observations:
The Cabinet was reportedly shown a presentation in the course of the war, outlining the IDF’s prediction of what taking control of Gaza would involve. According to the military’s estimates, conquering Gaza would take months and ridding it of all weapons would take five years. The cost would be hundreds of soldiers killed and 10 billion shekels.
That’s why the Hama model, where speed is of the essence, was never a serious option for Israel. That leaves the de-escalation model. The problem? How to de-escalate with a seemingly implacable enemy mixed in amongst a hostile population.
Remember, the idea of the de-escalation model is not to defeat the enemy, but rather to convince the bulk of the population it has no reason to fight and thereby isolate the militants, who can then be gradually picked off and made weaker over time. Due to the Israeli-Arab issue, the IDF probably can’t ever hope to win over the population by itself, but its Arab proxies could reasonably expect to do so. Israel probably can’t ever “win” in the medium term without resorting to measures the world would deem absolutely unacceptable, but it can hope to achieve relative safety and security for both sides.
It may sound counterintuitive, but Israel cannot achieve this relative peace as long as it is unwilling to accept more casualties than it causes. There are admittedly numerous flaws with this plan, chief among them the ability of the Egyptian soldiers to remain calm and disciplined in the face of the inevitable provocation. But it is much more likely to lead to success than the futile 2GW pound-and-ground approach.
Because 4GW is a process that resists conclusive engagements, 4GW counterinsurgency tactics must accept that reality and abandon any notion of seeking them. Such efforts are not only doomed to failure, but will usually make the situation worse in the long term. 4GW is based on the death-by-a-thousand-cuts model, so the correct way to fight back is to increase your ability to cut the other guy while reducing his ability to cut you.
Anyhow, those are just some thoughts from a complete military non-expert. And I think that’s enough about Zion for the time being. It’s time to turn our attention to the more serious conflict brewing in Eastern Europe.
The gentleman who had a job available for a member of the Dread Ilk has a few more on offer:
Thanks for posting the job opportunity. The turnout was pretty impressive. I am also coming across other opportunities that I am hooking Ilk up with. I have another one for you to post, if you are still inclined. We are looking for three more outside sales guys on the West Coast. These would be some spectrum of entry level to experienced.
As before, if you’re interested, shoot me an email with JOB2 in the subject and I will pass it on to the relevant party.