Fascist America and the technostasi

Big Brother is spying on you through your laser printer:

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

It must astonish those who have spent the last fifty years worrying about the establishment of a White Christian Fascist America to realize that they’re on the verge of getting a Rainbow Progressive Fascist America instead. No doubt plenty of them still believe things are progressing in a positive manner, but I suspect there are a few glimmerings of nausea in more than a few progressive stomachs.

Here is the list of the printer companies who secretly agreed to serve as technostasi for the Secret Service.

A teachable moment

I was driving to the post office today, listening to the pure essence of awesome that is Rock Sugar, when it occurred to me that a previous attempt to “correct” me served as an ideal example of the frustration regularly experienced by more intelligent individuals forced to deal with the regular attempts of the mid-witted to demonstrate their intellectual “superiority” to all and sundry.

In my experience, those of very average or sub-normal intelligence seldom attempt to correct people. They simply don’t dare. And with the exception of the socially retarded sub-set, those of high intelligence also seldom bother, either because it’s so much more trouble than its worth or because they view one isolated correction as being akin to attempting to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon. But mid-wits love little more than demonstrating that they know more than somebody else, especially in public, and they will readily leap at any opportunity to do so.

Anyhow, some time ago, I mentioned that Shook Me Like a Prayer was one of my favorite Rock Sugar mashups, and that I particularly liked the way it incorporated Hell’s Bells by AC/DC. Someone, I don’t recall who, immediately took the opportunity to jump on that statement, explaining that it wasn’t AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells, but rather, You Shook Me All Night Long that was the song that had been mixed together with Madonna’s Like a Prayer.

That was both true and false… and this is precisely why I hate midwits. First, they seldom have a sufficient grasp of the subjects they address, and second, they tend to inadvertently assume a position that requires the assumption that the person they are correcting is a complete and blithering idiot. I mean, let’s consider the facts that had to be known in this case to the midwit concerned:

(1) The Rock Sugar song is called Shook Me Like a Prayer and Rock Sugar songs are usually named after the two songs most utilized in the mix. Precisely how dumb does someone have to be in order to hear the song and somehow fail to recognize either chorus or the significance of “Shook Me” in the title? 65 IQ? 55? Actually brain-dead?

(2) To quote Wikipedia, “You Shook Me All Night Long is one of AC/DC’s signature songs from their most successful album, Back in Black.” It also has one of the most recognizable introductory guitar lines in rock history.

(3) Its occasional use during defensive stands in NFL games notwithstanding, Hell’s Bells is less well known than You Shook Me All Night Long and anyone who knows the former is almost surely familiar with the latter.

(4) Rock Sugar usually mixes in elements from at least three different songs even if only two of them serve as the primary sources and are referenced in the title. For example, Voices in the Jungle also contains the famous guitar melody from Sweet Child o’ Mine in the second and third choruses.

(5) There are freaking BELLS sounding in the middle of the Rock Sugar song.

Any one of those known facts should have been enough to give the correcting individual pause, but as we saw, they did not. Then add to those five known facts the two unknown ones that the midwit might have known, but couldn’t be reasonably assumed to know:

(6) AC/DC’s Back in Black was the first album I ever bought.

(7) I was a founding member of a band signed to Wax Trax! and TVT Records, and can therefore be expected to pay at least a little more attention to the more subtle elements that go into a song than the average individual.

Now, if you simply listen first to Hell’s Bells from the 22 second to the 40 second mark, then to Shook Me Like a Prayer from the 2 minute 28 second mark to the two minute 44 second mark, it should be completely obvious what I was describing. Despite not being one of the song’s two primary elements, Hell’s Bells is cleverly and seamlessly worked into the mix, which is precisely the aspect of the song I was praising.

The basic problem this example reveals isn’t that the midwit has no idea what he’s talking about, but that he has a partial understanding he erroneously assumes is a complete one. For those who find themselves tempted to be constantly correcting others, it might be worth keeping this example in mind to encourage a moment’s hesitation and contemplation before you leap in and embarrass yourself by attempting to “correct” an understanding that is materially superior to your own. At least on this blog, I have noticed that errors inspired by a combination of trigger words with insufficient reading comprehension appear to be the most common variety.

And on a barely tangential note, I was amused by DL’s email this morning:

I was putzing around in my SNES emulator the other day and loaded up “X-Calibur” or some such at random. Imagine my surprise (and triple-take to make sure I hadn’t misread) to find your past gig providing the music. Not a terrible little game, either. : )

Psykosonik: like the Spanish Inquisition, only louder, faster, and electronic.

An argument foragainst homeschooling

If this progressive argument against homeschooling doesn’t convince you to keep your children out of public school, your IQ is probably even lower than the average public school teacher’s:

“[m]any people, liberal and conservative alike, are deeply offended by critiques of compulsory schooling.” I suppose I am one of them. I benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States. My father, stepmother, stepfather, and grandfather are or were public school educators. As an education journalist, I’ve admired many public schools that use culturally relevant, high-standards curricula to engage even the most disadvantaged students. These schools are sustained by the talents of impossibly hard-working teachers who want to partner with parents and kids, not oppress them.

Despite our conflicting perspectives, I agree with Taylor that school ought to be more engaging, more intellectually challenging, and less obsessed with testing. But government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

The last sentence perfectly summarizes the progressive argument in a nutshell. The prime directive is to make sure everyone is under government control. Once that’s accomplished, then we can debate what’s to be done with them.

The fact of the matter is that the public schools are doomed thanks to the combination of declining societal wealth, an increasingly diverse population with correspondingly lower average IQ, and improving technology. And progressive attempts to shame parents back into the schools isn’t going to work because those who are most susceptible to progressive arguments, such as they are, are the least likely to have children.

Science has consequences

The inherent unreliability of science, and the fact that scientists know perfectly well how unreliable it is, is clearly demonstrated by the ongoing court case in Italy:

The courthouse in L’Aquila, Italy, yesterday hosted a highly anticipated hearing in the trial of six seismologists and one government official indicted for manslaughter over their reassurances to the public ahead of a deadly earthquake in 2009 (see ‘Scientists face trial over earthquake deaths‘ and ‘Scientists on trial: At fault?’). During the hearing, the former head of the Italian Department of Civil Protection turned from key witness into defendant, and a seismologist from California criticized Italy’s top earthquake experts….

The hearing also included some true scientific debate when Lalliana Mualchin, former chief seismologist for the Department of Transportation in California, testified as an expert witness for the prosecution. In 2010, when news about the indictment broke, Mualchin was among the few experts who openly criticized — and refused to sign — a letter supporting the indicted seismologists signed by about 5,000 international scientists.

Mualchin said that seismic hazards were not properly assessed in L’Aquila. “Italy is one of the countries with the best seismic knowledge in the world. And yet look at what a 6.3 earthquake has done to this city. That knowledge was not used, and scientists are responsible for that. They were conscious of the high risk in the area, and yet did not advise the people to take any precaution whatsoever,” he said.

One of the reasons that I consider many scientists to be both hypocritical and despicable is that they regularly expect everyone else to accept their scientific declarations as some sort of perfectly reliable magic eight-ball while resolutely refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever for the accuracy of those declarations. Now, the significant gap between the reliability of science and the public’s perception of that reliability isn’t always the scientists’ fault, as there are many examples of the science media and the mainstream media taking a perfectly reasonable statement by a scientist and turning it into an assertive declaration that brooks no possible doubt.

But when the public is paying their salaries, they have a right to expect material results from scientists, just as they have the right to expect that the public bus drivers will, in fact, drive the bus along the bus route. If the best that scientists can do is say “we have no idea what you should do”, then they probably shouldn’t be funded in the first place. And if they’re going to say that something is safe, then they are most certainly liable for any damages incurred if they are incorrect and people were harmed as a result of the misinformation provided.

It’s worth noting that scientists are usually at their most assertive when there is little chance of being held to account. But the reluctance of scientists to be held accountable in any way for their vaunted consensuses is further evidence that science should be considered fundamentally and intrinsically unreliable until it reaches a state that is more commonly described as “engineering”. Note that one can be held legally liable for the quality of one’s engineering, so what does it say of those who do not believe a scientist should be held legal liable for the quality of his science?

The tragedy of the mid-witted

It is truly remarkable what the moderately intelligent consider to be markers of superior intelligence:

I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.

As soon as I started, I realized I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately, the other cocktail waitresses were quick to make suggestions. My first night on the job, a fellow shot girl offered practical advice. “You have to be a little cold,” she explained. “Make them feel like you’re doing them a favor by letting them buy shots.” But it’s difficult to maintain a Queen of Sheba demeanor while trying to rub globs of green glitter out of your eyes. Instead I became a level of friendly you typically only see at Disneyland, if Disneyland reeked of vomit and spilled appletinis. I doled out shots as people in cartoon costumes offer hugs. The manager would point out that I wasn’t being sexy enough, which was surprising, because I was wearing 6-inch heels and less clothing than I ever had.

It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner.

As we often see on this blog, those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence. But while having an IQ between one and two standard deviations above the norm is unusual, it is hardly rare, and in historical terms it is distinctly pedestrian.

The astonishing thing about Miss Wright’s confession isn’t that she was clueless and solipsistic little snob, but rather, that she still appears to believe that she is highly intelligent on the basis of familiarity with the works of a trivial and silly science fiction writer with a poor grasp of history. If she had any brains at all worth noting, then she wouldn’t have needed someone else to point out that clever people are everywhere; in addition to the ease with which this can be observed in the material world, even a basic knowledge of intelligence statistics would indicate that this must be the case.

If this erstwhile pirate wench had simply noted that Mensa, with its 130/132 IQ floor, potentially represents the top 2 percent of the population, she would have known that there are some 6.2 MILLION Americans who are significantly above the “read a book” level that she sets as a significant benchmark.

The difference between the mid-wit and the genuinely intelligent is usually fairly easy to identify. The mid-witted individual tends to compare himself to those below the average and concludes that because he isn’t like them, he must be a genius. The genuinely intelligent individual compares himself to the great minds of the past – with which he is familiar, having experienced many of their works – and concludes that for all his intellectual superiority to the great mass of relative retards presently surrounding him – he is nothing particularly special. The tragedy of the mid-wit is that he lives in a world that simply doesn’t exist and is constructed flimsily out of his unimaginative imagination due to his failure to either observe the real world or think about it. His is is a very plain and simple world, and because he is not only comfortable in it, but important in it, he reacts with fear and hostility when he is forced, for one reason or another, to confront the fact that it does not exist.

Intelligence doesn’t concern name-checking authors nor does it consist of being literate or even well-read. And even if one has been granted unusual cognitive capacity by the grace of God or the roll of the genetic dice, it remains little more than potential until one proves that one can actually do something, preferably something worthwhile, with it. Just as the mere fact of height doesn’t make one a basketball player, the mere fact of high intelligence doesn’t make one a genius, a philosopher, or anything else except a statistical oddity.

Genius is neither a state of being nor the possession of potential, it is the completion of material intellectual accomplishment. Mozart had enormous musical gifts, but even such a prodigy would not have been a genius had he not troubled to take the time and effort required to compose his music. Newton had one of the most astonishing minds ever possessed by homo sapiens sapiens, but he would not have become one of the most awe-inspiring geniuses of history had he never stopped to think about his casual observations of the material world. Genius is not born, it is self-created.

I suggest that before you can reach a place that requires effort, you must first realize that you are not already there.

The scheduled default

Amidst all the sound and fury in the media signifying nothing, the banks are calmly going about planning for the scheduled Greek sovereign default:

Senior bankers on Wall Street have been given detailed documentation setting out a timetable to Greek default, including firm dates and technical ‘orders’ about last use of the euro as a currency there. The revelation arrived at Slogger’s Roost last Monday, since when I have been trying to obtain corroboration. This arrived in the early hours of today (Thursday). One of the banks is Barclays Capital (Barcap) run by controversial figure Bob Diamond. The other must remain anonymous for the time being, in order to protect sources. The document asserts that Greece will officially be declared in default by all the ratings agencies after the close of business on Friday march 23rd .

Legitimate? We’ll find out soon enough. It’s certainly a lot more credible than the multiple announcements of a deal that has miraculously saved Greece, the Euro, the EU, and the global economy. How many of them have we seen generate short-term EU/USD spikes in the last six months, ten or eleven?

I think it’s fairly obvious that the Eurobankers and their pet politicians knew from the start that they weren’t going to do any more than the initial “bailout”. But this way, they can pretend that the process is under control and business should proceed as before.

General Franco is still dead

As it happens, so is global warming.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday. The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

As I have previously noted, the death of global warming also puts a bullet in the head of the concept of “scientific consensus”. Global Warming fabulists can either a) admit that they were lying and there never was any scientific consensus, or b) scientific consensus that differs from mainstream consensus is no more intrinsically reliable than astrology.

There is a word we use when science reaches the point of reliability. That word is “engineering”.

Speaking of Nazis

Ever vigilant on behalf of the forces of political correctness, ConWebWatch is keeping a close eye on my WorldNetDaily column:

See if you can catch all the Nazi references Vox Day has dumped into his Jan. 29 WorldNetDaily column…. Day also describes German chancellor Angela Merkel as “Bundeskanzlerin,” which, it turns out, is not a Nazi reference; it just sounds like one.

No, it’s her actual title, as it happens. And I’m hardly the only one to notice the similarities between the German-dominated EU and their historical counterparts. In any event, I wrote Terry to request a correction.

Hello Terry,

I am writing to correct your January 31st blog post. This is not, by any standard, a Nazi reference: “In Europe and in the United States alike, the heyday of the banks is rapidly coming to a close. The looming revolution is not a battle between capitalism and socialism, or a class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but between the corrupt bank-government axis and the alliance of pretty much everyone else. “

It is, rather, a Marxist reference.

However, I must congratulate you, as you were absolutely correct to not include the reference to “Das Lied der Deutschen” in the title as a Nazi reference; although it is often considered to be one by the insufficiently historically informed, it is actually connected to the Weimar Republic that preceded National Socialist rule.

With regards,
Vox

The end of the Euro

I’ve been predicting this since it was forced upon the people of Europe. Now, the first material signs of its demise have appeared:

Are quasi-drachmas being issued?

These financial instruments are bonds, and have all the characteristics of Hellenic Republic Bonds: they bear international securities identification numbers (ISINs); they are negotiable on the Athens Exchange and they rank pari passu with other Greek debt. The government, in one of its press releases, notes that “bondholders who choose to discount these bonds at the banks will crystallise a 19% discount versus their original claim.”

We would argue, however, that they are more than just another bond issued by the Greek government. To be specific, they seem to us very akin to what economists call quasi-monies. These quasi-monies have appeared in a number of cases, usually put in place by government to find an escape valve out of nominal fiscal rigidities in the face of a financing issue. This especially happens in a case of a government of a monetary union that cannot print money to fund its deficit….

If a country issues a bond as repayment, even temporarily, for a supplier, then there is no withdrawal of money from the private sector as no-one purchases the bond with cash. It is a form of barter in which the vendor provides a good to the administration and receives a financial instrument created ex nihilo from the same government.

There have already been possibly apocryphal reports of Italians using lira and Spaniards using pesetas. But this is the first time that an EU government is printing a new monetary instrument that can be used in exchange for goods and services.

Richard Dawkins, sans pants

This is absolutely and utterly hilarious. In case you still don’t believe that Richard Dawkins is a cretinous ex-scientist long past his sell-by date, I suspect this will suffice to convince you:

If you were trying to come up with a definition of misplaced intellectual arrogance, you could not do better than having the planet’s most famous atheist issuing diktats on who does and doesn’t count as a proper Christian. Prof Dawkins then announced, triumphantly, that an “astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”.

The transcript of the next minute or so only hints at how cringingly, embarrassingly bad it was for Dawkins.

Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Dawkins: Yes I could.

Fraser: Go on then.

Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the fight… in the struggle for life.

Fraser: If you asked people who believed in evolution what that question, and then you came back and said two percent got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go they don’t really believe it after all. It’s just not fair to ask people these questions.

It was a golden minute of radio. But as well as being hilarious, it was hugely symbolic.

As I have said repeatedly, Richard Dawkins is a huge intellectual fraud, and perhaps those who previously expressed incredulity at the idea that I would quite easily trounce the old charlatan in a debate will find it just a bit more credible now. This behavior isn’t an outlier or a momentary lapse of memory, it is entirely characteristic. The man quite frequently pretends to knowledge that he patently does not possess and assumes he knows things that he obviously does not, which is why he avoids debate with those who are aware of his intellectual pretensions and are capable of exposing them.

It’s bad enough that Dawkins couldn’t come up with the name of what he considers to be the most important book ever written immediately after claiming he could do so, but in addition to stumbling a little on the subtitle, he even forgot the rather important part of the title that refers to the actual mechanism supposedly responsible! And furthermore, I am very, very skeptical of the assertion that 64 percent of self-identified Christians were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament in a multiple choice question with four answers. I’d quite like to see what the other options were, as my guess is that most of the people who got it wrong didn’t pay sufficient attention to the question and reflexively answered “Genesis”.

Just in case Richard is reading this, the correct answer is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

UPDATE: Here is the audio recording. It’s actually even better than the excerpt of the transcript provided, which I have updated accordingly.