A matter of compliance

Please note that SocialGalactic is no longer accessible from IP addresses in the European Union. We request that you do not discuss various means of attempting to circumnavigate our compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 here or on SocialGalactic.

We regret the necessity of blocking access to the site and we will be investigating less onerous way of complying with this regulation in the near future. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: Day 3. 1,000 Followers. The site now has 2,126 users, has seen over 500 concurrent, (there are 270 right now at 6:15 AM EST) and has already acquired a nickname. #TheCore.

Build. The. Damn. Wall.

Ann Coulter makes a compelling case for military action by the Commander-in-Chief:

Who can say with a straight face that the importation of tens of millions of Latin Americans has not changed the character of our country, the safety of our people and the economic prospects of so many of our fellow countrymen?

The conditions on the ground in Vichy France were less altered by war than the conditions on the ground in America today, compared with America circa 1980.

By the way, what, precisely, is the “military purpose” of building schools in Djibouti? How about building walls, schools, bridges, hospitals, roads and water purification systems in places like Vietnam and Iraq?

Our military did that!

The U.S. Navy Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers have built all kinds of non-military infrastructure in, among other places, Djibouti, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Somalia, the Congo, Cambodia and Grenada — even in little Micronesia (population: 100,000).

A couple of years ago, an American sailor who had just helped build a school in Ban Nong Muang, Thailand, was proudly quoted in Seabee Magazine: “My recruiter told me to join the Seabees. He said they build schools in foreign countries for kids.”

The U.S. military does these things in other countries but, we’re told, can’t build a wall in our own.

You promised Americans a big, beautiful border wall, Mr. President. It’s time to deliver on that promise, no matter what the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Federal Judiciary, the State Judiciaries, or the media says. Because if you don’t, nothing else you have done or plan to do is going to matter.

If you’re worried about privacy, Mr. Bezos

Then why don’t you shut down your company’s efforts to build a better surveillance state?

IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.

That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”

“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.”

It’s more than a little ridiculous to cry about your privacy being violated when you are literally building the system for permanently eliminating everyone’s privacy.

If you choose rhetoric

You will get rhetoric. JF’s fans are crying that it’s unfair I have responded to JF on the rhetorical level. They also don’t know what “disingenuous” or “ad hominem” mean:

Look its disingenuous for Vox to whine about JF’s rhetorical dismissals and then ad hominem attack him.

There is nothing in the least bit disingenuous for someone whose dialectic overtures are met with rhetoric to subsequently switch to rhetoric. Nor am I asserting that JF’s irrelevant objections and inability to distinguish between concurrent and successional regimes, and between Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens sapiens, have anything to do with his panoply of physical, philosophical, moral, and mental shortcomings. What he said in the debate was simply wrong. The total number of seeds ever produced by every tree in the forest over time says almost nothing meaningful about the historical annual growth rate of the trees standing in the forest today.

I just find it to be tremendously amusing that an autistic French degenerate who sexually preys on women living really kickass lives is stupid enough to rhetorically attack a) a comedian and b) the author of what may the best modern book on rhetoric, both of whom are more intelligent and more socially hardened than he is, and his fans somehow interpret this as evidence of his superior intelligence.

If you know anything at all about Owen Benjamin, if you know anything at all about me, then you have a pretty good idea how merciless this is going to be and how long it is likely to last. So, don’t shed any tears, don’t bother shaking any fingers, just sit back, have a croissant, and enjoy the ride.

Introducing SocialGalactic

Twitter is SJW-controlled territory. Gab is a hellhole of defamation and Nazi trolls. So, after many of Infogalactic’s supporters asked us to provide something on the social media front, the InfoGalactic team joined forces with OneWay and created a new social media alternative: SocialGalactic.

We’re presently in Beta. Free accounts have 140-character posts and 1MB storage, which is just enough for an avatar and a header. We’ll soon be making Pro accounts available at three levels, which will provide posts of 200, 480, and 999 characters, and image storage up to 500MB. Sign up and check it out!

For the Burn Unit members who are already on the site, please note that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. Log in and log out to make sure that you’re running the latest version, which includes:

1)  Badges for member levels
2)  Character limits based on member levels
3)  Mobile improvements
4)  Moderator controls
5)  Notifications counters
6)  Position of post you are relying to in modal.
7)  X closes DM modal.
8)  Bio in dark mode
9)  Post counters on home page.
10)  Online user counter on home page.

Please keep in mind that SocialGalactic is NOT a free speech zone. Don’t be vulgar, don’t post nudes or obscene material, and behave in a civil manner. If you want spicy memes and bantz, you’ve already got Gab. Don’t bother asking for more image storage for free accounts, as we’ve identified that as a primary attack vector by trolls and monkey-wrenchers and we’re more likely to reduce the image storage than increase it.

They never saw it coming

Boys are now excluded from the Boy Scouts:

The Boy Scouts of America welcomed the establishment of Troop 86 in Vulcan and Troop 219 in Helena on February 1st. But these two troops are different — no boys, all girls. The first two of their kind in Central Alabama. With the formation of these two troops, a debate has taken hold. Some think this compromises the central mission of the Boy Scouts, whereas other believe it gives girls new opportunities that they never had before.

It won’t be long before men are excluded from the pulpits of Fake Christian “churches” too. This is why our ancestors didn’t allow women to join men’s groups in the first place.

The retreat begins

Torin was trying to cover JF’s intellectual surrender and his retreat from math, science, and logic in our debate earlier this week:

You seem quick to dismiss JF but what he said made perfect sense to me. If you want to create your own model OK. But if he is not comfortable with your assumptions also fine. I am confused a bit by the attacks but I guess this is just play. Yet the attribution of “fleeing” and “don’t call it science” are things I would not say unless I was damn sure. And since I have expertise in some fields I know how hard it is to be damn sure

Sir Hamster was having none of it:

“seem” – I watched the debate, and I saw JF making objections to the model that were already accounted for in the model. I knew it the moment he said it in the debate, and Vox confirmed it in tonight’s Darkstream. 

“comfortable” – JF’s feelings as a biologist are not very interesting or relevant when we can demonstrate his objections are irrelevant.  Having watched the debate, JF fled the moment he retreated to rhetorical plays, like when he claimed he was crushing Vox’s dreams. 

Vox was stepping through the construction of a model using generous assumptions favorable to TENS. That’s not a dream, nor was it crushed. TENS advocates should have built their own model. They haven’t, nor do they want to. At this point, the reasonable conclusion is that they don’t want to deal with the questions such a model would bring. 

If you want to call what I said, “attacks”, you should recognize that JF resorted to rhetorical attacks in the debate. It was intellectual surrender. 

Torin tried to maintain a fighting withdrawal:

I saw two different models because of a disagreement on assumptions. Sure there was some rhetoric. But a lot of rhetoric is going on here. This is why I stopped playing team sports. Have a good one.

But Owen Benjamin had the last word in his analogical description of the debate:

Vox: We can measure how tall the trees are. And we know how old they are. So, what is the annual rate of growth?

JFG: No, no, it is time for me to crush your dreams. Can you not see all zee seeds zat are scattered around zee forest? Zere are so many of zem! Meellions and beellions! Now look at zis picture, do you not see how zee acorns, zey have zee different sizes? Zoot alors! Croissant!

The amusing thing is some of JF’s fans are demanding that I debate him again, not 12 hours after insisting that he crushed me.

The reason you don’t want a second debate is clearly because you are a terrible loser and dishonest intellectual. You really think that biologists haven’t gone over these theories of yours before? If you are so certain that all of this is satanic gamma talk perpetuated by 110 IQ mid wits then why not destroy JF and the rest of us in a second debate. Because you are afraid of losing even more face, nobody is fooled by your stammering retort in this video. Man up and put your ideas to the test or admit defeat!

Of course I’m not going to debate him again. As I observed in the Darkstream last night, there is no point, since he’s either too dumb to understand the issue or too dishonest to address it directly. I gave him the chance to refute my case, he whiffed more completely than his followers are even able to understand, and I was able to learn what I needed to learn. Let’s not forget, this was the second time I’ve spoken to him about something that wasn’t his book, and the second time he has completely failed to understand a perfectly straightforward argument.

I’m beginning to wonder if Downe’s Syndrome might be sexually transmitted.

Intra-media war

When the Washington Post goes to war with the National Enquirer, I think we all know who wins. America.

Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)

In the AMI letters I’m making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.

Be assured, no real journalists ever propose anything like what is happening here: I will not report embarrassing information about you if you do X for me. And if you don’t do X quickly, I will report the embarrassing information.

Nothing I might write here could tell the National Enquirer story as eloquently as their own words below.

These communications cement AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism. Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.

I’m both amused by Jeff Bezos’s appeal to the nonexistent integrity of “real journalists” and amazed that the National Enquirer people were willing to put their demands in writing.

But I don’t see why Bezos should resist the idea of giving a false public statement. There are literally dozens of them published in his newspaper every single day.

Darkstream: thoughts on the evolution debate

Possibly the most interesting thing about this debate was how it demonstrated the power of rhetoric to persuade those incapable of understanding dialectic. More than a few of JF’s fans sincerely believe that he blew both me and my case away despite the obvious fact that he didn’t even begin to address the latter. For example:
  1. He claimed that mutation rates rather than fixation rates were more relevant to my case, even though “the fixation probability is one of the cornerstones of population genetics.”
  2. He failed to grasp that the 2009 Nature study specifically involved parallel gene fixation, thereby accounting for the entirety of his objection to my case. He thought my case assumed a successive-mutations regime even though the study obviously concerned a concurrent-mutations regime.
  3. He retreated to rhetoric and misdirection by bringing up that list of genome sizes and population mutation rates, neither of which said anything about actual fixation probabilities or time frames.
  4. The fact that there are “millions and billions of mutations” says absolutely nothing about how fast a single mutation propagates through an entire population, let alone provides part or all of the basis for a speciation event. The fact that each human child is born with an average of 70 mutations doesn’t say anything about how long it took to fix the genetic structure of the human eye throughout the entire human population.
Now, if you don’t understand the significance of a scientist resorting to rhetoric rather than directly addressing the subject at hand, I don’t think you’re tall enough for this ride. These things should become considerably more clear once I have the transcript of the debate and can analyze it at my leisure.

Quantum Mortis #4 is out

QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted #4: We Regret to Inform is now available at Arkhaven Comics in high-resolution CBZ format and Kindle format for $2.99. As are the three previous issues.

Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower is a ruggedly handsome military policeman who hates aliens. Fortunately, as a member of His Grace’s Military Crimes Investigation Division – Xenocriminology and Alien Relations, he gets to arrest a lot of them. Sometimes he even gets to shoot them.

Chief Tower and Detector Derin Hildreth of the Trans Paradis Police Department are investigating the murder of the Crown Prince of Morchard, and when there is a second attempt on the life of his brother and successor, they rush to the scene. But their investigation is complicated by the discovery that the assassin is in the employ of a foreign embassy. Does Tower dare risking the wrath of an ambassador with diplomatic immunity? Do you even have to ask?

The Kindle version is also available on Amazon now. It will NOT be available in Kindle Unlimited.