And Morgoth Smiled

The Dark Herald explains why there is no chance that the Amazon demolition of The Silmarillion is not going to make the execrable Disney Wars trilogy, the abysmal Godfather III, and the tedious final season of A Game of Thrones all look like entertaining cinematic masterpieces in comparison:

Christopher Tolkien was the good son of a great man; he steadfastly protected his father’s legacy and works. But he is gone now. The estate now belongs to Tolkien’s grandchildren and ALL of them are trust fund babies who act like trust fund babies. They want their other friends with money to stroke their asses and tell them how brave they are being for letting Bezos bastardize and soil their grandfather’s work. They are completely blind to the fact that this pile of fetid garbage is going to stain people’s memories of his masterpiece.

This whole catastrophe started with Jeff Bezos saying he was determined to have his own Game of Thrones. Which means that this abortion is going to be a derivative work of George R.R. Martin, not JRR Tolkien. The producers are denying this with tears and oaths but the fact that they hired an Intimacy Coordinator (AKA Sex Arranger) tells you what books this show is based on.

The truth is, this show isn’t based on any of Tolkien’s books. What Amazon has the rights to are the background notes. No joke, that is what they own the rights to and that is what Bezos has spent hundreds of millions on.

While the contract they had with Christopher Tolkien had some very strict limits with regards to what they couldn’t do with regards to JRR Tolkien’s overall story arc, it had a major loophole in that they could create new characters. And boy, did they ever.

In addition, they have undeniably altered established characters significantly. Galadriel, Commander of the Northern Fucking Armies. No, I’m not kidding they got her that wrong.

It’s not just the SJW wokery. It’s the complete disrespect for the source material and the author.

DISCUSS ON SG

Reflections on Organizational Success

Dominic Cummings shared some practical thoughts on his commenter’s notes on the obstacles that organizational Machiavellians always pose to the core objectives of the organization:

  1. Boris types [self-servers with zero interest in the mission – VD] are everywhere.
  2. difference with Groves, Mueller, Bob Taylor et al is that they align talent with a goal and squeeze Boris types out, with extreme prejudice. some of those environments are relatively civilised, some (e.g S Jobs) less so, no doubt.
  3. near everybody is calculating about themselves but the situation around them changes calculations – if people think ‘leadership is great and i agree with the goal and i love being here and others are here for the mission’, like at PARC, then selfish calculations shrink (not disappear) to being overwhelmed by what’s important
  4. the organisations that really change the world POSITIVELY have other things that dominate – boris d stuff was in no10 in 2020 when i was there, but people knew there was something else. now they know there’s nothing else.
  5. think you’re right about a tendency to entropy! as you say… groves, mueller, taylor… all pushed out… and the succession problem…
  6. the widespread failure even to see these problems provides opportunity, but… if it were easy everyone would do it…

The succession problem to which he refers is tremendous, and it is one to which I have given considerable thought over the years. The three primary challenges that I have identified concerning it are as follows:

  1. The loyal lieutenants are never candidates to succeed the leader. The skills involved in building and leading an enterprise seldom have anything whatsoever to do with being an effective long-time loyal subordinate. History has demonstrated this again and again and again, and yet very few loyal lieutenants ever grasp that they are literally some of the worst possible successors or that their skill set is entirely inadequate for the task to which they aspire. It is imperative that they understand this: deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
  2. The leader must not hang on too long. I’ve personally witnessed several organizations go down the tubes because the leader simply couldn’t bear to give up the status of being in control, even though he observably no longer had any interest in being responsible for actively running things.
  3. Equality among successors is futile, dangerous, and counterproductive, in both management and ownership terms. About the only thing more destructive a man can do than divide the ownership of an organization equally among his heirs is to leave it to his wife or to a charity organization.

DISCUSS ON SG

This Bodes Well for the Future

I, for one, welcome our future AI overlords.

Get inspiration for a story from an Al, just write two themes and see the first paragraph come alive.
Themes: Vox Day
and Otters
Story: There once was a man named Vox Day, and he was a very controversial figure. Some people loved him, and some people hated him. But no one could deny that he was a powerful speaker and writer. One day, Vox Day met an otter named Otter. They started to become good friends, and Vox Day taught Otter about the importance of freedom and liberty. Otter was so inspired by Vox Day that he decided to become a strong advocate for these values, too. This story is about how Vox Day and Otter helped to change the world for the better. They showed us that there is nothing that can stop us from achieving our goals if we are willing to work hard enough for it. Thanks, gentlemen, for your inspiring example!

They clearly like me a lot better than our current quasi-human rulers do. Chew on that, Charles Stross!

UPDATE: The AIs don’t leave much doubt as to why I am so widely feared. It’s all about the skulls.

There’s a movement afoot, a group of people who believe that the future of the human race rests on the shoulders of young people. They call themselves Vox Day’s Children and they believe that only through the propagation of our kind will the future of humanity be secured. Vox Day is a controversial figure, but he’s got a point. Skulls, skulls everywhere. And not just any skulls, but the skulls of the great and the good. The skulls of the thinkers, the scientists, the inventors. The skulls of the people who have made the world a better place. The young people of Vox Day’s Children believe that these skulls are the key to our future. They believe that by venerating them, by studying them, by understanding what they represent, we can secure the future of humanity.

DISCUSS ON SG

We Wuz Alfs

Amazon is blackwashing Tolkien’s elves in Tha Rangz a Powwa:

Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is set to take the franchise in a diverse new direction, featuring the first ever black elf in Middle Earth’s history. New images for the much-anticipated series, which has a reported budget of $465 million, have been released by Vanity Fair, and show Ismael Cruz Córdova taking on the role of silvan elf Arondir…. The series is set to feature the most diverse cast in the franchise’s history, and along with starring a black elf, Lenny Henry will star as a harfoot elder. Sophia Nomvete also stars as a dwarven princess named Disa – making her the first black, and female, woman to play a dwarf in the Lord of the Rings universe.

Black elves, black hobbits, and black dwarves. This grotesquerie is going to redefine the concept of “epically bad”.

For a considerably more Tolkienesque take on elves, you may wish to consider reading the comic series A THRONE OF BONES on Arktoons.

(gets back to work finishing A SEA OF SKULLS)

DISCUSS ON SG

How We Succeed

A comment on Dominic Cummings’s site offers an illuminating insight into why this community has successfully executed multiple projects and exceeded expectations:

When I was at business school, we once played a week long strategy game in random teams of 5. The game was played in 10 rounds and teams had to decide on maybe 50-80 parameters for each round, there were 2 rounds per day. All of the other teams made their decisions in the typical Machiavellian manner and as with any MBA cohort this is ruthless stuff to behold. Everyone was using teams decision making as an arena to position for dominance within their small team of 5.

This was fascinating to me. All of the energy in the building was focused on the “self” v’s 4 colleagues rather than my team v’s the other 40 teams.

Now everyone at business school studies dozens of business failures and turn-arounds and various other textbook examples. I was obsessed with studying hyper success, I was alone in this and people thought it was a bit wonky and naive of me. But I didn’t care for all the reasons that organisations failed. It seemed to me that failure was a bottomless pit of various reasons. Whereas the really hyper successful teams would have succeeded not only at the thing they set out to do, but I believe they would have succeeded at anything you asked them to do. People like Gene Kranz of mission control also believed this. Anyway, I brute forced the entire game with various methods which required much spying other teams and reverse engineered much of the game engine in the 3 practice rounds. We won the whole competition easily and by a huge margin… The game could have been rerun many times and I know that we would have always won every time. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t luck.

Interestingly hyper successful teams always seem to dissolve with entropy once their binding objective is completed. <- a discussion for another time

But they all really focused on three things i). objectivity ii). learning iii). executing

The first casualty of Machiavellianism is objectivity, AKA the truth. The truth is not useful to the individual, it is only useful to the team. The individual benefits from asymmetric information, the team benefits from universally symmetrical information.

There are so many mechanisms at play here, so many tools and control surfaces that can be abused by the Machiavellian careerist types that unless you play the game you cannot compete with them. But the result at the macro level is mediocre organisations.

You can build hyper performance teams, there is a blueprint. But you either need an intersubjective fiction (a shared mission) that is so powerful it is effectively a cult/religion, this was the case with Manhattan, Apollo and a few other cases.

Or you need a supremely powerful guardian figure a kind of god in the machine, much like Steve Jobs or more recently Elon Musk who is obsessed with the three pillars i). objectivity ii). learning iii). executing.

Both the Dread Ilk and the Bears are occasionally accused of being cults. But apparently, it is that very cognizance of a shared mission that enables both communities to effectively accomplish various activities. Although the utility of the policy of ruthlessly removing every volunteer who fails to perform even the most simple task for any reason also tends to increase the odds of success, as it weeds out most of the self-serving Machiavellians from the start.

DISCUSS ON SG

Killshot is Cancer Shot

Further to last night’s Darkstream, more and more evidence is coming in that indicates the mRNA vaccines are triggering existing cancers in the bodies of the vaccinated.

Item 1: Anecdotal evidence and the DMED database show “cancer coming back with a vengeance”.

The DMED database shows the rate of cancer is up by 3X after the COVID vaccines rolled out. See ACT OF WAR: Thanks to COVID “vaccines,” the military’s cancer rate has more than TRIPLED

In talking with Ryan Cole about this, he believes this is primarily due to accelerating existing cancers (ones people already know they have or recent cancers that people never realized were there) rather than creating new cases of cancer.

The bottom line is that don’t be surprised when after the jab, you suddenly have a relapse or a new cancer.

Item 2: No one who was infected with Covid should have ever gotten vaccinated against it. Natural immunity remains as strong as it was at the start even 20 months later, while the vaxxes only offered limited protection for 3-6 months.

The screamfest has been that “oh, if you had Covid, you’ll get it again so you need the jab.”

There was never any evidence for this claim. Now, we have duration data out 20 months, basically the entire pandemic, and… I’ll just quote it:

Among 295 reported COVID-confirmed participants, 293 (99%) tested positive for anti-RBD antibodies (≥250 U/mL, 44%; ≥500 U/mL, 27%; ≥1000 U/mL, 15%). A median of 8.7 (IQR, 1.9-12.9; range, 0-20) months passed since reported COVID-19 diagnosis. The median anti-RBD level among those who tested positive was 205 (IQR, 61-535) U/mL. There was no evidence of association between time after infection and antibody titer (0.8% increase [95% CI, –2.4% to 4.2%] per month, P = .62)

There was no evidence of deterioration of protection, such as it is. Yet we know, factually, that when you get jabbed the titers disintegrate over the space of just a few months. There was never evidence this would happen in people who got the virus and recovered.

Item 3: The mRNA and the spike proteins migrate to and persist in the lymph nodes. This may explain the connection between the vaxxes and cancer.

This study asserts that the mRNA and the spike protein produced persists for weeks in lymph node germinal centers in human patients. Having worked with mRNA for decades, I can attest that this is highly unusual.

Remember that mRNA is not new technology. Moderna has been trying to commercialize it for about a decade now for various indications, including cancer. Cancer, of course, is a disease where very high risks are tolerated because the alternative is basically always death, and any sort of bad thing is better than death.

But they’ve never made it work. The reason is that every time they had enough dose to get the results they also got toxicity; the injected stuff got broken down too fast otherwise, and if you raised the dose the toxicity went up enough that you couldn’t get an effect without screwing the patient.

This is the history of mRNA — until now. It’s why it has never been deployed in human disease before; it’s not for lack of trying.

Malone hypothesizes that what changed was the substitution of pseudouridine (a synthetic that does not exist in nature) for uridine is the reason the mRNA jabs are able to produce the spike without being destroyed first. Well, that solves one problem but produces another; the body is incapable of clearing it because it doesn’t recognize it as foreign.

So now what is injected migrates through the body and is taken up instead of staying at the injection site, doing its thing and being rapidly degraded and cleared. That the latter happens is known because we have the Japanese data, which they demanded Pfizer produce, that show wildly-elevated presence in the ovaries, among other tissues. This should not have happened, but it does.

We knew this early last year and yet did nothing with that information. Now we know why, and its much, much worse than my base working hypothesis — that it was simply a function of the very high vascularization found in muscle tissue. Nope.

It was only a matter of time before the long-term adverse effects of the vaxxes began to show themselves. The fact that the Fake Biden Administration has declared a new war on cancer is a pretty solid indication of what those long-term adverse effects are anticipated to be.

DISCUSS ON SG

Biologists REALLY Don’t Get Math

A follower of JFG tries to defend him. It doesn’t go well.

He clarifies his position on jfgtonight regarding the model used by vox is based on bacterial cloning and doesn’t address that a population with sexual reproduction where replacement values are above 2.

This is simply embarrassing, though not particularly surprising given the fact that it required no less than three tries for JFG to understand that a 115 IQ for a substantial portion of the Jewish population of Israel necessarily dictated a sub-90 IQ for the rest of the Jewish population, given the reported average Israeli IQ.

This is the sort of thing that happens when people are incapable of understanding basic math without being walked carefully through all the relevant numbers involved.

What JFG is claiming in his clarification is that because sexual reproduction CAN result in faster gene fixation than bacterial cloning when measured in terms of generations, it is possible for the fixation rate to be high enough to account for genetic divergence between chimps and humans since the LCHCA, as well as every other observed genetic divergence over time.

However, this is not true. What JFG and his followers forgot to take into account is that it is not generations that are relevant here, but time. And although bacterial cloning may – or may not – be slower to fixate a gene across a population than sexual reproduction in generational terms, bacteria also have considerably more generations over a given period of time than humans do.

To use the two specific examples I cited, the bacteria was observed to have 14,016 generations per year. Primates have 0.05 generations per year. And fixation through sexual reproduction is not, and has never been, observed to be more than 280,320 times faster in temporal terms than fixation through bacterial cloning.

I used the bacterial model in order to demonstrate that the case for natural selection was impossible even when applying the fastest possible fixation rates ever observed. So, my argument absolutely did cover the situation of a population with sexual reproduction where replacement values are above 2, because there is absolutely no case where a sexually reproducing mammal will fixate a gene across its population in less time than a bacterial population.

So, you will note that JFG not only failed to refute my argument, he observably failed to even understand it or the relevant math required.

UPDATE: He really, truly, honestly doesn’t get it.

This is a complex question and there will not be a single number. It will be dependent on what is defined as fixation (is a gene similar across 99.99% of humans fixated or not?). It will also depend on what we do with genes that could have been fixated to be different from the common ancestor but then reverted back to their common ancestor form in our evolutionary history. Does that count for 0 or 2 fixation events? The number will also vary depending on how we count similar fixation events that have happened parallelly in the two species. I’m not raising these concerns to avoid answering the question, just pointing to the fact that this number is not unique according to how we approach the problem.

With all that being said, none of my argument relies on this number being a particular value, so sure, let us accept an average of 2.22 fixed mutations per year on average for the purpose of discussion… now what?

The problem of @voxday’s thesis is not that we disagree on this number. It is that @voxday’s calculations fail to take into account the higher rate of fixation in sexual species such as humans compared to non-sexual ones such as bacteria. Meiosis is a bitch.

Now what? Darwin is done. Evolution is done. Natural Selection is done and comprehensively dusted. That’s what.

DISCUSS ON SG

Hultgreen-Curie Strikes Again

The first female F-35 pilot crashes on her first attempt at a carrier landing:

Following the publication of a video of a collision between an American F-35 fighter and the deck of an aircraft carrier, it became known that the world’s first female F-35 pilot was behind the wheel of a fifth-generation US Navy fighter. This, according to American sources, was her first flight from the deck of the aircraft carrier, which turned out to be enough to destroy a fighter worth more than $ 100 million.

What a complete surprise! Who could ever have seen this coming?

DISCUSS ON SG