The decline and fall of Minneapolis

The epicenter of the George Floyd riots were a little less than one mile down Lake Street from my high school. Now Somalis are shooting it out two blocks away from where I first met Spacebunny:

Two people were killed dead and eight more were injured in a mass shooting overnight in downtown Minneapolis, according to police.
One of the injured still was listed in critical condition as of Saturday evening, while the seven others suffered non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
The Minneapolis Police Department said all 10 shooting victims are adults, five male and five female. The two deceased victims are males.
The names of the victims and suspects have not been publicly released.
The shooting involved a dispute between two people who both pulled out guns and started shooting at each other, according to Minneapolis Police Department PIO John Alder.
The incident took place downtown along the 300 block of North 1st Avenue.

Minnesota liberals are just about the most literally suicidal people on the planet. And having grown up among them, they deserve exactly what they are getting.

I don’t understand the Scandinavian societal death wish, but for all of their once-formidable legacy, they appear to have somehow been transformed into the dodo birds of humanity. Perhaps it is because historically, they were always the invaders and never the invaded.

Saint Breivik, pray for us.

Devil Mouse is killing the classics

The Disney copyright extension is running out:

As the year 2000 approached, Disney had a problem. Copyrights on some of the company’s earliest cartoons, including “Steamboat Willie,” were set to expire soon. As one 1998 report put it, “[w]ithout copyright term extension, the company faces the potential nightmare of seeing its greatest treasures pass from corporate possession into the public domain.” Americans would be free to reproduce Disney’s public domain works, and even make new stories derived out of that content, without worrying about getting sued for copyright infringement. With “billions of dollars in revenue” at stake the report adds, Mickey Mouse went to Washington.

The story of how the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, known within the copyright bar as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, came to be is pure Swamp. In 1998, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner descended on Trent Lott’s office to ask the Senate Majority Leader for help. “He was very much interested in seeing the copyright bill,” Lott said at the time. As Congressional Quarterly reported, “[b]efore he left the spacious offices of the majority leader at the U.S. Capitol on June 9, Eisner was assured that his company’s pet bill would get the help it needed.”

In addition to Eisner’s visit, the company donated money to key committee leaders, including Republican Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina, who was then the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Arts and Intellectual Property. Disney also “paid $2,700” to host House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife “for three days at Disney Institute, the company’s educational facility in Orlando.”

When it was all over, Mickey Mouse had his way with the Republican-controlled Congress. With unanimous consent in the Senate and a voice vote in the House, Congress enacted the extension, tacking an additional twenty years onto existing copyright terms.

Fast forward to today. The extension Disney toiled for on Capitol Hill in 1998 is about to run out. As early as 2024, key Disney cartoons will pass into the public domain. 

The irony is that public domain is how works survive over time. In fact, most of Disney’s best IP is derived from the public domain. Instead of further extending the copyright period, as the Devil Mouse will almost certainly attempt, it should be reduced to the life of the author + 20 years. That’s more than enough time for the heirs and copyright holders to sufficiently profit from a new creation in order to justify it being created in the first place.

Thomas Wictor remains confident

I am too, although for different reasons.

People will tell you that nothing can be done about the 2020 election.

Why do they say that?

Because they haven’t thought it through.

Trump knew LONG beforehand that the election would be stolen.

Why didn’t he stop it?

Because it was in his interest to let it happen.

It was a trap.

For ALL of his enemies, foreign and domestic.

Clearly Trump’s enemies know this.

Yesterday, there were people AGAIN telling us that he was going to prison.

No evidence of this offered.

And we have hysteria and chaos among Trump’s enemies.

Where’s the hubris of Obama? Remember his cockiness after he won?

Biden and Co. and almost sheepish. Everyone’s hardly bothering.

But the press is suddenly hysterical.

Tons of stuff is being revealed, and the Democrats are being sabotaged on every front.

The Trump and Pence families have virtually disappeared. They can travel when and where they want undetected.

Electronic warfare aircraft and spy planes are in constant use.

Biden has zero influence at home or abroad, except at the border.

And THAT is a massive blunder. 

Trump is saying in plain language that HE will do something before 2022.

He means legally and constitutionally.

REMEMBER:

Precedent means nothing to Trump.

Neither does difficulty.

One of the great mistakes people make is believing that something can’t happen if THEY THEMSELVES didn’t think of it.

Trump uses that to his advantage.

Trump does things in a way that makes it impossible for him to not get coverage by the mainstream media.

Therefore he’s got something HUGE planned.

He told us before he “left office” that our story was just beginning.

Then he began acting in ways that no other former president has.

I hope that he is right about Trump still being in control. I don’t know about that, as I don’t see any actual evidence of it at the moment. Nor does the 12D Chess theory align particularly well with what we saw in action during the first Trump term. What I do see, however, is plenty of evidence that Biden is not in control, Harris is not in control, and all of the foreign leaders know that the fake administration is not calling any shots.

It’s pretty obvious that the USA is presently under some form of interregnum, although whether it is legal or not from a Constitutional perspective, I have no idea. Nor am I convinced that it is the US military, in the form of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are calling the shots. I simply don’t know. And that’s fine; it’s not as if the average farmer on the Italian Peninsula had any idea who was making decisions in Rome while Caesar and the Senate were at war either.

Just remember, the one thing we absolutely know to be false is what the mainstream media declares to be true, which is in this case is that Joe Biden is the duly elected President of the United States. He obviously wasn’t elected and he clearly isn’t presiding.

But I’m certainly curious to see what comes next.

At least no one can call her racist

In which a black woman demonstrates her dissatisfaction with the current advertising narrative:

Police in Georgia are hunting for a woman who dished out a brutal beatdown on a mother — right in front of her infant daughter.

Sickening witness video captured in a Little Caesars restaurant on Monday shows the suspect holding the woman on the floor by the hair with one fist, while repeatedly punching her in the head with the other.

Most distressingly of all the victim’s infant daughter rushes into the fracas trying to protect her mother, but a bystander pulls her out of the way just in time, while the filmer shouts “Move the baby! Move the baby!”

No such help comes for the victim though; despite her screams of terror, everyone in the store stands around either watching or filming. One man even holds the door open for them as the assailant drags the mother by her hair into the street.

She continues to throw her around by her hair, stamping her head into the concrete, before finally walking away, leaving her a bloody mess on the ground.

It would be both informative and salutory if every anti-racist white individual who “doesn’t see color” were to go through a similar educational experience. Two observations:

  1. The white woman is a mudshark. Note the appearance of her infant daughter.
  2. There are multiple black men literally standing there filming the beating of this paragon of anti-racism. Not only do they not intervene, they look downright amused as the sister is beating the hell out of the stupid white girl.
Eventually, it is going to dawn upon the smug anti-racists of the world that the objects of their equalitarian genuflections actually despise them most of all. 

Saturday AM Arktoons

SEASONS Episode 4: Shadow

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 4 A Century of Vengeance

I’ve been having some interesting conversations with creators who are just hearing about Arktoons now and are interested in getting their comics on the site. Also, a few of the comics with short runs are scheduled for replacement, so expect to see some changes in the weeks to come. And if you’re enjoying the site, don’t forget to subscribe! As you can see from the views, the traffic is solid and steadily growing, and we’re just over one-third of the perpetual production goal.

Scientistry exacerbates bad scientody

The reproducibility crisis in science, which is the fact that most peer-reviewed studies published in the most-reputable science journals cannot be replicated, is being significantly exacerbated by the fact that the nonreplicable studies are cited far more often than the replicable ones:

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management.

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing “replication crisis” in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don’t hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.  

“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’”

The link between interesting findings and nonreplicable research also can explain why it is cited at a much higher rate—the authors found that papers that successfully replicate are cited 153 times less than those that failed.

“Interesting or appealing findings are also covered more by media or shared on platforms like Twitter, generating a lot of attention, but that does not make them true,” Gneezy said. 

Serra-Garcia and Gneezy analyzed data from three influential replication projects which tried to systematically replicate the findings in top psychology, economic and general science journals (Nature and Science). In psychology, only 39 percent of the 100 experiments successfully replicated. In economics, 61 percent of the 18 studies replicated as did 62 percent of the 21 studies published in Nature/Science.

With the findings from these three replication projects, the authors used Google Scholar to test whether papers that failed to replicate are cited significantly more often than those that were successfully replicated, both before and after the replication projects were published. The largest gap was in papers published in Nature/Science: non-replicable papers were cited 300 times more than replicable ones.

Apparently my prediction that science would be as reliably false as government press releases may have been an observation, not a prediction. Putting the reproducibility problem together with the non-replicable citation problem indicates that present scientage – the current scientific knowledge base – in Nature/Science is only 0.5 percent reliable.

Granted, that’s half-a-percent more reliable than government press releases, but still reliably wrong. In other words, almost everything that “studies show” has no support from an actual scientific perspective.

No tainted blood, onegaishimasu

The Japanese ban the vaxxed from donating blood:

The Japanese Red Cross now refuses to accept blood donations from people who have received the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine.

The website of the Japanese Red Cross states that individuals who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 “are not allowed to donate blood for the time being.”

The same page warns potential blood donors that they will not be able to give their blood for a certain time after they have received different vaccinations.

Some deferrals prevent blood donations for 24 hours after vaccination, including after getting vaccinated for influenza, cholera and tetanus. Others prevent blood donations for two weeks after vaccination, such as after getting the hepatitis B vaccine.

But… but… but isn’t it perfectly safe? No, no, it isn’t.

This isn’t that hard. 

Discrimination in STEM

 Ironically, the discrimination is against men, not women:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. 

Science is already as unreliable as a coin toss. In another ten years, science will be as reliably false as government press releases.