Even, I Can’t

It would be difficult for me to disagree more strongly with anyone than I do with this literary heretic spewing textual heresy on SocialGalactic:

One book I’ve really come to hate is Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Doesn’t get more reddit than that. The author thinks he is much more clever than he is. I read it in high school, and was underwhelmed. Based on the hype, I was expecting something epic, but all I got was nonsense humor that wasn’t even funny.

First, Douglas Adams is one of the funniest authors to ever write a novel. I place the top five in this order:

  • PG Wodehouse
  • Douglas Adams
  • Owen Stanley
  • Bruce Bethke
  • Terry Pratchett

Wodehouse remains the greatest of the humor writers, not merely due to the very high standard he set, but the size of his ouevre and its reliability across a broad spectrum of topics and characters. Whether he was utilizing Hollywood actresses or agriculturally-inclined aristocrats and pigs, he could always find the humor in the situation.

Stanley is one of the funniest novelists ever and the fact that I convinced him to write The Promethean is my single greatest literary triumph. With regards to his first novel, The Missionaries, an SJW reporter once asked me what was the best book Castalia House had published, read it, and later told me: “It’s the most racist and offensive book I have ever read, and I just couldn’t stop laughing. Now I hate myself.”

The fact that Bruce Bethke essentially stopped writing fiction after Head Crash is one of the great literary tragedies of our age.

And while Terry Pratchett’s earliest work and later work can be forgotten, his middle period, when he matured as a writer, brought in an element of social commentary, and learned how to actually write humor instead of telling the reader what he was supposed to find funny, was very, very good.

Adams had more than a few tricks at his disposal, but his patented subdued punch line never ceased to be effective. My two favorites:

  • “Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled “My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles” when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth.
  • The bathroom was not large. The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the age and nature of the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwise the fittings were stark and institutional. There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stains and chips in the enamel, and also a small basic basin with a toothbrush and toothpaste in a Duralex beaker standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably priceless panelling above the basin was a tin mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many times, and the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation. The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. There was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, with an old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly folded but threadbare small towels. There was also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it.

DISCUSS ON SG

No Jets for Ukraine

AC contemplates the military utility of nonexistent weapons systems:

The UK will not give Ukraine any jets since it does not have jets to spare, but it will help Ukraine get F16s from other countries if they can find any, and then train them on them, although one problem there is the UK does not actually have any F16s to train them on. It sounds like we are at the point where we are now offering Ukraine imaginary weapons we are sure we will find someday.

Of course, not being a military historian / geomilitary strategist like myself, AC has clearly missed the salient issue here, which is the way those nonexistent weapons now being allocated to Ukraine were already been committed for non-use in a war with China over Taiwan island by RAND and the US military wargamers.

DISCUSS ON SG

Arktoons Wants You

We now have over 4,000 episodes live on Arktoons, and for the next 4,000, we could use some additional volunteers to help us continue creating comics for Project Asteroid.

If you have Photoshop, or GIMP, you can help us create episodes, clean up artwork, and bring new life to old comics. We need you to be able to help us for approximately five hours a week. No experience is necessary as we can teach you the relevant skills and techniques.

We are also looking for people to contact other publishers to tell them about Arktoons and encourage them to come on board. If you would like to join the production team or be an Arktoons Ambassador, please email ArkhavenComics(AT)outlook(DOT)com.

Hide Mode Activated

It’s not only the neoclowns who are in retreat now. If this 2020 article from Commentary is to be believed, it appears that Jews are increasingly concerned with scrubbing their early lives from Wikipedia.

My new best Wikifriend’s user name was “Coffee,” and he’s a conscientious editor. He politely informed me that it was appropriate to introduce my faith into my entry because it was “covered in a reliable source,” a Wikipedia standard for inclusion. That turned out to be the Times Book Review’s “ham-eating Jew” reference. Other Jewish professionals may not have had their religion listed because there was no such source for the citation. I had been kept from editing the insertion because Wikipedia protocols blocked removing properly sourced material. “I know that’s not the answer you were looking for,” he conceded.

He was right. It’s possible, I wrote back, that the “editor” who introduced Jewish identity into my and many other entries was so proud of the Jewish contribution to journalism and literature that he wanted the world to know about all these accomplished Jews. But, given the recent spate of overt anti-Semitism here and in Europe, it was certainly plausible that the intruder was trying to stigmatize Jewish “notables,” in the Wikipedia term of art. It seemed to me possible that Wikipedia was naively invoking a valid standard—reliable citation—to enable its material to be doctored by a stealth anti-Semite.

Ten days later, Coffee replied: “I have taken the description off…your article and am now in the process of combing through the thousands of edits made by this user to remove other violations. We determined that even though a reliable source covered your upbringing it was not enough to support the claim in your article. This was based on it not being of due weight to your notability, and because there is not a consensus of sources covering you in such a way. I’m applying this standard to every article…that this person edited and will likely have to look at others than just [those that] this editor has added as well (as this seems to be a rather big issue”).

In two weeks, he’d found more than 250 intrusions he considered inappropriate in entries of not-previously-identified Jewish “notables” and 1,142 in Wikipedia’s lists of Jews in 32 fields. These lists include everyone from cartoonists (43, including Jules Feiffer, Rube Goldberg, and Al Hirschfeld) to poets (28, including Allen Ginsberg, Emma Lazarus, and Delmore Schwartz). And there were hundreds more articles to vet. Most of the “Jew-tagging” had been in articles about notables in media and writing, but Jews in finance and retail were involved, too. Reviewing “tens of thousands” of interventions by one “editor,” Coffee found that he or she had added religious descriptors almost exclusively for Jews.

Jew-Tagging @Wikipedia, Commentary, May 2020

How, one wonders, is the identity of Emma Lazarus and Allen Ginsberg deemed unworthy of note, given the way in which it served as the foundation of the work that made them notable? Not that the retroactive scrubbing will serve to hide anything at all. Because, as has been the case for most of written history, it’s not their identity that is the issue, but rather their evil, observable, and societally-devastating actions.

Even a ticket-taker like Elon Musk knows: “Soros hates humanity. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.”

DISCUSS ON SG

The Failure of Modern Science

Peer review was supposed to be the gold standard of science. Instead, it turned out to be a fraud that polluted the knowledge base, corrupted the profession, and destroyed confidence in the method.

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.

Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.

The results are in. It failed.

The Rise and Fall of Peer Review, Adam Mastroanni, 13 December 2022

It’s very important to remember that most people neither know or understand anything about science, so the idea that science is not only less than perfectly reliable, but is, in fact, reliably false is extremely foreign to them. They have no idea that reliable science is called “engineering”, and in fact, their grasp of the credibility of the two fields is usually inverted.

But if you are an independent thinker capable of processing information on your own, it should not be too difficult to grasp that science is intrinsically flawed due to several unavoidable factors that boil down to the absence of any controlling factor for the human element.

Peer review was never that missing factor. As I pointed out years ago, peer review doesn’t even rise to the level of editing, much less auditing, it is more akin to slush-file reading by volunteers. The great irony of the primary defense of peer review is that it is a concept based on nothing more than pure logic utilized to justify an activity specifically conceived to replace the use of pure logic.

UPDATE: The retards are never going to learn, no matter how reliably they fail.

It’s already starting in the comments: I don’t think it failed perhaps as much as it stopped working. REAL PEEER REVIEW HAS NOT BEEN TRIED.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Treason Interview

The Washington Post omitted significant sections of its recent interview with Vladimir Zelensky. From Russia Today:

The Washington Post has deleted a large tract of an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in which he lashed out at alleged “traitors” in his ranks. RT is publishing the entire section that the US newspaper would rather keep hidden.

The following section appeared in an interview with the Ukrainian president published on Saturday. By Sunday it had been removed with no explanation. After discussing a trove of recently leaked Pentagon documents, which revealed – among other things – that the US monitors Zelensky’s communications, the newspaper presented him with a fresh allegation that has not yet been reported in the US media.

Note that Evgeny Prigozhin is the founder and head of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company currently fighting in the Donetsk People’s Republic.

WaPo: The documents indicate that GUR, your intelligence directorate, has back-channel contact with Evgeny Prigozhin that you were aware of, including meeting with Evgeny Prigozhin and GUR officers. Is that true?

Zelensky: This is a matter of [military] intelligence. Do you want me to be convicted of state treason? And so, it’s very interesting, if someone is saying that you have documents, or if someone from our government is speaking about the activities of our intelligence, I would also like to ask you a question: With which sources from Ukraine do you have contact? Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country. Which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: I talked to officials in government, but these documents are not from Ukraine, they are from…

Zelensky: It doesn’t matter where the documents are from. The question is with which Ukrainian official did you talk? Because if they say something about our intelligence, that’s treason. If they say something about a specific offensive plan of one general or another, this is also treason. That’s why I asked you, which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: About these specific documents? You are the first person I am talking to about them.

Zelensky: Okay.

WaPo: And I can read you what information exactly there is about Prigozhin and the GUR. On February 13, Kirill Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, informed you about a Russian plan to destabilize Moldova with two former Wagner associates. Budanov informed you that he viewed the Russian scheme as a way to incriminate Prigozhin because “we have dealings” with him. You instructed Budanov to inform Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Budanov told you that the GUR had informed Prigozhin that he would be labeled a traitor who has been working with Ukraine. The document also says that Budanov expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the GUR and meetings with GUR officers in Africa…

Zelensky: Listen, to be honest, well, you just read something, you say something. I just don’t understand where you get it, whom you talk to and so on. You talk about how I met with Budanov. This suggests that you – how do you put it? It looks like you have people who have some records or you have some evidence or you have something, because that’s what it looks like.

Here are the Zelensky ‘treason’ quotes the Washington Post deleted, Russia Today, 14 May 2023

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Zelensky knows the days of the Kiev regime are numbered. Both the USA and the UK are taking bigger and bolder risks with their anti-Russian activity while the media clowns are cranking their narrative machine up to eight or nine in the hopes that they can somehow alter the situation through their word spells.

And, in the meantime, both China and Russia are saying less and less, even as the Russian Air Force begins to strike more heavily at targets in western Ukraine. It feels as if something has to break soon, but what and when cannot be known with any degree of confidence.

DISCUSS ON SG