Tag: freakshow

I’m not a UFO conspiracy guy myself, but it’s not hard to see how this sort of government behavior is going to confirm the more radical X-File-style UFOlogists in their suspicions:

Britain’s official UFO investigation unit and hotline were closed down at the start of December. Since then reports of strange sights in the skies sent to the MoD have been kept for 30 days before being thrown out, the newly released policy document shows. This stance was adopted so defence officials would not have to publish the information in response to freedom of information (FoI) requests or pass it to the National Archives.

It says: ”Reported sightings received from other sources should be answered by a standard letter and… should be retained for 30 days and then destroyed, largely removing any future FoI liability and negating the need to release future files post-November 30 2009.”

The memo reveals that MoD chiefs made a point of not discussing their plans to close the UFO unit with other countries because of fears this could be perceived as part of a global cover-up.

It states: ”We have deliberately avoided formal approaches to other Governments on this issue. Such approaches would become public when the relevant UFO files are released, and would be viewed by ‘ufologists’ as evidence of international collaboration and conspiracy.”

Actually, this approach could work well for the “climate scientists” too. Gather the data, then throw it out as soon as you’ve generated your hockey stick graph so that you don’t have to show it to anyone. Now, I know that most people are idiots but this is really astonishing. Hiding and destroying information is not exactly the most effective means of convincing the general public that there is nothing to hide.

Being blissfully ignorant of all things related to past and present Academy Awards, I was a little uncertain about what to do when we were invited to an Oscar-themed party this weekend thrown by a couple with whom we are friends. We were asked to write an acceptance speech and give it as if we had won an award; naturally this responsibility was delegated to the writer-half of the couple. After Spacebunny rejected my first idea, which was to simply strip and reveal a succinct “Soy Bomb” message – she correctly pointed out that was the Grammys and not the Oscars – I decided that one could not go wrong with following the lead of Mr. Marlon Brando. Hence the following speech.

Hello. My name is Anakin Skywalker. I’m a Sith Lord and I am a vice-president of the Galactic Affirmative Image Committee for the Dark Side of the Force.

I’m representing the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic this evening, and he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech which I cannot share with you presently, because of time, but I will be glad to share with the press afterwards, that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award for Most Sadistically Egregious Abuse of an Overused and Outdated Metaphor.

And the reasons for this being the treatment of Sith Lords today by the film industry, and on television in movie re-runs, and also with recent incidents on Naboo, Ondoran, and the fourth Moon of Yavin.

I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening, and that in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love, generosity, and if need be, the genocidal destruction of every sentient race that dares to oppose the will of the Sith.

Thank you on behalf of Darth Sidious.

To properly appreciate the effect, imagine that you have a few drinks in you. And also note that in in addition to wearing black tie, I happened to be sporting a Darth Vader mask while being accompanied by the host providing the requisite bronchial chorus.

It is eminently clear that I must totally revise my opinion regarding precisely how and why the Apollo Moon landings were faked:

It should be understood from the beginning that The Shining is Stanley Kubrick’s most personal film (outside of, possibly, Eyes Wide Shut). Before we are done here it will be easy to see that Kubrick was only using Stephen King’s novel as a launching pad (excuse the pun) to be able to tell a completely different story under the guise of making a film based on a best-selling novel. He did this for a very important reason – mainly to save his life.

I’m not sure which I find more enjoyable. The film interpretation, which is 110 percent pure awesome, or the hysterical reactions of people who can’t read manage to read all four pages for fear that they might start to believe it.

JB writes, floridly:

All hail your economic eminence. Your mastery of the abstruse and arcane is appreciable to me only by the accuracy of your predictions. Inspired by you and others to take both videogames and poetry seriously, I have written a poem on Dragon Age: Origins. I doubt it will be of interest to someone who hasn’t played the game.

The question that occasions this email is, by what method do you write your poetry? This is the first time I have managed to create passable meter. Here was my method:

1. Brainstorm the emotional units of meaning
2. Structure rhyming couplets and quatrains
3. Reorder the couplets and quatrains
4. Fix meter problems
5. Fix diction problems

However I don’t think the above method could create poetry with an ABAB rhyming structure, which I’ve seen you use. Do you have any tips? Also, what are you playing lately?

Fascinating. If I were the Sports Guy, JB’s email would definitely close the mailbag. I don’t have a poetic method per se, I simply write it with the rhymes in the right place and hope the syllables and meter are correct. I guess my only tip would be to buy a good rhyming dictionary; the online ones tend to be limited in scope. In answer to his other question, I’m finally on the verge of finishing Fantasy General, I’m playing CoD:MW2 on both the PC and PS/3, I’ve got Mario Kart hooked up on the exercise bike, and I find myself unexpectedly on the verge of being defeated in ASL scenario S2 War of the Rats.

Turgot’s Tetrapylectomy! Jonathan somehow manages to make more mistakes while trying to defend the hapless Amazon critic.

Actually, the original reviewer is completely correct. Vox was forgetting that in the multiplier effect, the “new” money becomes deposits at other banks. It is still thus true that at each and every bank, the profits stated by the reviewer are correct.

The original reviewer isn’t correct in any way, shape, or form. The reviewer completely leaves out the multiplier effect, which merely happened to be THE SUBJECT AT HAND, in favor of a trivial focus on the interest revenue – not profit – from a single loan, which he also manages to miscalculate. (He used the wrong interest rate.) It is demonstrably incorrect to say that “the ‘new’ money becomes deposits at other banks”, the most that can possibly be said is that it will USUALLY become deposits at other banks. I assumed for the sake of simplication that the revolving loans and deposits were all taking place at a single bank; this is hardly an unreasonable postulate in light of the fact that Bank of America presently holds 12.2% of total US deposits and 14.8% of total US loans and leases. (Now you know why they can’t be permitted to fail.) That third sentence only applies for each and every LOAN, not for each and every bank. And finally, since it seems everyone is determined to be pedantic about this, I note that the reviewer’s profit calculation could never have been correct since the example in the book was 5%, not the 6% cited in the review.

I’ve made it perfectly clear that I should have created a better example of the multiplier effect in a fractional-reserve system. Mea maxima culpa. I should have referred to “banking system” instead of “bank” and I should have left out the “maximum profit” altogether since it’s not possible to calculate the net profit of the loan multiplier without knowing how many times the loan cycle will occur in the course of a year. But the trivial errors in my poorly constructed example do not justify this absurd level of pedantic and error-filled nitpickery, especially since it doesn’t even begin to call either my point about the fractional-reserve banking system or my conclusions about the systemic risks of such a system into question.

Mikio is merely the latest in a tediously long series of would-be critics to show up, repeatedly make blatant errors of fact and logic in an attempt to criticize one of my posts, then whine and cry because I’m not inclined to indulge inept argumentation. Since these critics, (who used to be feminists but of late have tended to be atheists), are more than a little handicapped when it comes to logic, it seems to escape their attention that the reason the Rules of the Blog exist is because their behavior is not only common, but reliably follows a predictable pattern.

Rule 14: “It is my intention to give individual commenters up to three opportunities per post to criticize what I have posted there. Since I do not have any interest whatsoever in wasting time on futile attempts to explain things to the willfully obtuse, the intellectually underpowered, or the disingenuous, I will cease to engage with a commenter after he has committed three demonstrable errors of fact or logic in that comment thread. While I will identify those errors, I am not inclined to be drawn into tangential discussions of them. Attempts to claim that my refusal to further engage with a commenter whose arguments have repeatedly been demonstrated to be flawed are the result of cowardice or an inability to respond are false and will be deleted.”

Now, the fact that Mikio fell into the “intellectually underpowered” category was obvious from the start, but was underlined by his hapless attempt to quibble with my demonstration of his errors, which actually exceeded the requisite three. The amusing thing was that he subsequently attempted to argue that my explication of his incompetence, which was amply demonstrated in the preceding comments, was an ad hominem dismissal. As anyone who actually knows what the term means, it quite clearly was not.

Strike 1 – erroneous assumption confusing observation for fairy tale
Strike 2 – failed analogy
Strike 3 – false accusation of logical incapacity and unsupported assumptions

As is the social autistic’s wont, Mikio has proceeded to whine, complain, and even lie about why his later comments were deleted, despite the fact that they were treated precisely as the rules dictated they would be. He has now asserted that because comments which violate the rules are deleted, there is a possibility that I am avoiding strong arguments that expose the flaws in my thinking. He is not the first to suggest this; it is a common theme among those who find their comments getting deleted. He has also claimed that the regular readers here are obsequious and clueless followers and that challenges to thinking are not welcome here.

Of course, it is easy to expose the numerous falsehoods in Mikio’s dishonest claims. While it is theoretically possible that some strong arguments are being deleted, because I almost never delete the first few comments made by any commenter, we have sufficient evidence to judge the general quality of the arguments that have been presented as well as information about the intellectual capacity of the person presenting them. For example, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that the same individual who made the panoply of errors that Mikio did in the post entitled The Porker Principle is capable of producing stronger and more effective arguments.

Second, dozens, if not hundreds of readers have the opportunity to read posts that are deleted. While some masochists may enjoy such posts, no one has ever seen fit to argue that any of them have been deleted because they are too effective or because I am incapable of answering them. Third, Mikio assumes that I do not have access to deleted comments for future use in the event that someone is foolish enough to claim that I was incapable of answering a specific argument they made in a comment that was deleted. Fourth, the large number of critical comments contained in the comments over the last five years show that challenges to my thinking are far more welcome here than they are anywhere else on the Internet. There is considerable evidence, both here and on other sites, that I am not one who fears debate and runs away from it. Finally, the six thousand or so daily readers who are familiar with this blog all know very well what small minority of comments get deleted and why, since the behavior is so predictable.

Once someone demonstrates that he is either unable or unwilling to engage in rational, intelligent debate, there is no reason to waste any time on them or their comments since it is like dunking a basketball on a fifth-grader. I have no reason to ban them, but neither do I have any interest in anything they have to say. I understand that it’s difficult to accept that you’re not quite as intelligent as you were led to believe back when you were the smartest koi in the little garden pond, but it’s a lesson that you’re eventually going to learn one way or another. And the sooner you learn it, the less of an ass you’re going to make of yourself in the future.

As I have repeatedly warned, post-Christianity isn’t necessarily that shiny, sexy, secular science fiction society that so many atheists fantasize about. Secularism is merely a transition phase from civilization to barbarism:

Witch doctors in Uganda have admitted their part in human sacrifice amid concerns that the practice is spreading in the African country…. The African country’s government claimed human sacrifice was on the increase. According to officials trying to tackle it, the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity – and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.

It is all to telling that so many clueless atheists are more worried about prospective Ugandan laws banning homosexuality than they are about the rise of human sacrifice! And it’s interesting to see yet another example smashing the progressive notion that rising levels of development and prosperity will suffice to create a more civilized society.

If enforced impartially, this law could actually work rather well for a lot of henpecked men. An awful lot of women would be wearing electronic tags within six months, which is why it will presumably be administered as a male-only offense:

France will become the first country in the world to ban ‘psychological violence’ within marriage later this year. The new law, which would also apply to co-habiting couples, would see people getting criminal records for insulting their loved ones during domestic arguments.

Go ahead, madam. Show off for your friends by telling them how your husband is worthless around the house and doesn’t know how to change a diaper. He’s got the police on speed dial.