Tag: trainwreck

The scouring of The Hobbit

This review of the second part of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy does not sound at all promising:

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them….

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes
foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female
elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be
the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the
dishy elf or the hunky dwarf?

Ye cats. It is becoming abundantly clear that Jackson’s biggest blunder was choosing his co-writers. Seriously, he couldn’t find anyone better than HIS FREAKING WIFE AND HER FRIEND?

This is rapidly approaching Star Wars prequel-levels of absurdity. Permitting Pink SF to invade MIDDLE EARTH is a crime against literature. It’s a crime against HUMANITY. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Pink SF is a cancer. It is an infectious disease that ruins everything it touches. Defiling the literary grave of Tolkien goes well beyond girls doing their usual shitting in the boys’ sandbox, this is the Pink SF equivalent of suicide bombers.

Why not throw in an orc-human romance while he’s at it? Why not lasers and lectures on global warming? Or, even better, an UNDEAD ORC-human-werewarg love triangle!

An amusing revelation

Keep in mind that Alex from London is the sort of Englishman who invariably mocks American ignorance of the world:

This is the terrifying moment a trio of gunmen stormed into a disco and opened fire on a crowd of terrified dancers.CCTV captured the moment when the men pull out their guns and push past bouncers to get inside the disco in Cali, Colombia, before they start spraying bullets around the room.The victims’ blood flowed out of the nightclub and into the street after the gruesome 20-minute long attack.

 Alex, London, United Kingdom, 2 hours ago
“Absolutely horrific! Hopefully Obama will be able to change their gun law. It can’t carry on the way it is.”

It should certainly be fascinating to see what Obama can accomplish with regards to the gun crime in Cali, Colombia. This should take place not long after David Cameron deals with the pressing issue of the undercapitalized banks in Athens, Greece.

PJ O’Rourke on the Baby Boomers

Here is one Baby Boomer who appears to be willing to cop to being a member of the worst generation ever, but as is his generation’s wont, he ends up trying to spin the facts on his generation’s behalf:

We’ve reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We
are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest
contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault.

This
is every generation’s fate. It’s a matter of power and privilege and
demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs
the bill for it. And the baby boom, seated as we are at the head of
life’s table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y and the Millennials
all saying, “Check, please!”

To address America’s baby boom is to
face big, broad problems. We number more than 75 million, and we’re not
only diverse but take a thorny pride in our every deviation from the
norm (even though we’re in therapy for it). We are all alike in that
each of us thinks we’re unusual.

Now, before Ryan launches in with his usual generational public defender routine, I readily admit that every member of a generation is not identical or even in step with the generational norm. But we are talking about a collective here! And more importantly, we are talking about a proudly self-identified collective here. So to bring up individuals in this context is not merely moot, it is a basic category error.

They claim they changed the world. We agree. We merely observe that they changed it for the worse.

Some Baby Boomers try to smugly point out that Generation X is also responsible because we have not fixed the problems they caused. They tend to ignore the fact that they are actively standing in the way of any and all attempts to do so. I was correct about the 2008 financial crisis and correct about the failure of the Federal Reserve and the Congress to successfully fix the situation. Did the Fed turn to me or any other GenX economist who correctly observed these things?

No, they appointed yet another Baby Boomer, one who will step up the intensity of the failed policies of the previous Baby Boomer. So what more can I, or any other member of Generation X, now do except point, laugh, and look forward to the day when we can shut off the generational parasite’s life-support machines.

Mailvox: the wages of public school

MY writes about the problems her family is having with her niece:

I’m writing this on behalf of my sister, whom I’m very close to.  I have a niece who is giving her parents a great deal of grief lately. I debated writing this but I don’t think we could get a perspective like yours from anywhere else, if you would be so kind. X is 13 and on a fast track to making some very bad choices. She is very dependent on her friends and bends to peer pressure to a ridiculous degree. She does not socialize with her siblings unless forced to and is rude and distant.

A few weeks ago her dad asked to look through her iPad, something they randomly do from time to time. X refused and ran out of the room with it. When they finally got it from her my sister says she couldn’t figure out why X wanted to hide it as there was nothing incriminating on it. I told her I thought she erased things. We know this to be true now.

As punishment her parents took the iPad away. They caught X sneaking into their room at 3am, stealing it back. She is now indefinitely banned from her iPad.

A few nights ago my sister noticed her phone missing. On a hunch she decided to check X’s room after X fell asleep. She found the phone and a series of texts from a instant messenger site on it. The texts were to a couple people. One was a boy and of course, the text had a vulgar sexual nature to them. The boy was asking her if she twerked and X was flirting back with him. The other texts were to a girl, making plans to hang, and X noted that she had to make sure to call the friend on a land line so her parents wouldn’t get suspicious about her texting.  Another text was from a high school boy. I’m not sure what he said to her but this particular boy is known to have fathered a child by another middle school girl. So my sister puts the phone on her night stand and waits. X sneaks back in and takes the phone again back to her room. At this point mom and dad both get up to confront her. They go take the phone back and find not only has X erased the texts but she also took the app off the phone.

-My sister substitutes at the school X attends. Another mom who works there, mother of one of X’s friends, showed my sister a series of texts on her daughter’s phone from X. The texts were loaded with crude song lyrics, f-bombs, and the word “bitch” in all its uses.  The girlfriend did not use the vulgarities that X used.

-X has, obviously not taken any responsibility for her behavior. She claims the texts to the middle school boy about twerking were just jokes and she has never met the high school boy, etc. She can’t explain how the high school boy knows who she is. She is sulky, short-tempered, self-obsessed, entitled, and generally lazy at home.

My sister and her husband have gone through some major financial upheavals in the last 5 years. My brother-in-law now works for my dad but is not making enough yet for my sister to quit her job again. My sister is thinking of pulling them all out of school next year. I note this because my first response was to suggest pulling X out of school among other things. They have removed all the electronic toys from the house and store them at my dad’s office. They also took the door completely off her room.

They are a traditional family that regularly attends Latin mass and my sis is just stunned by this behavior. I am too honestly. None of the other three kids are like this. Her behavior is very self-destructive for her age. Short of pulling her out of school, how to you change a 13 year old’s character? How can they provide consequences in a way that will get a positive response instead of this nasty, passive aggressive sulking? How do you get a child this self-obsessed to stop focusing on herself and show empathy and affection for her family? What resources would you recommend?

It’s important to note that this sort of thing is always a possible consequence when children are abandoned to a public school environment. It’s not an inevitable consequence, to be sure, but there are always going to be those children who are, by character, more susceptible to it than others, regardless of their upbringing. I strongly favor homeschooling for all children, but especially for those with weak, easily-influenced characters.

My recommendation would be to pull X out of school immediately. The nature of the problem exhibited is serious enough to justify drastic action, especially in light of her blatant lying, stealing, and other Machiavellian actions. The other children can probably wait until next year if they are not showing any signs of similar behavior. But the school year has barely begun and there is a very good chance that X will get herself into trouble of one sort or another in the next eight months.

As SB pointed out, these problems aren’t something that started overnight. They are character problems, they are firmly implanted, and they will require a long period of boot camp-style attitude readjustment.So, in addition to pulling her out of school and the solid steps the parents have taken to deny her communications and privacy, they should rely upon the method proven to work by various militaries throughout the world. For the next six weeks, they should put her to work until she is too exhausted to find trouble.

By Christmastime, X should be an expert in grouting, deep-cleaning, and every surface in the house should be sparkling. And then there is a credible threat hanging over her head when the strictures are gradually relaxed; every time she is tempted, she’ll be weighing whether it is worth another six weeks of hard manual labor.

All socialization outside the house and parental supervision should be barred until further notice. X is a child, she is a dependent, and as long as her parents are legally liable for her actions, they have the right and the responsibility to prevent her from indulging in her short-sighted, self-destructive tendencies.

There are no guarantees, of course. Despite her parents’ best efforts, X may become an overweight mudshark with a meth habit and two abortions under her belt by the time she is 18. Or she may turn it around completely. Regardless, the probability is that if her parents don’t directly and forthrightly address the situation with consistency and resolve, she will destroy her life in one way or another. Unfortunately, some people are just naturally self-destructive.

One of the hardest things to accept as a parent is that we cannot make our children’s choices for them. What we can do is decide upon the primary influences upon them. In the case of the child who is greatly susceptible to peer pressure, the answer is straightforward: take care to ensure that her peers are positive influences rather than negative ones.

The MIN campaign

From Wikipedia circa 2023:

Moar Inflation Now (MIN) was an attempt to spur a grassroots movement to stoke inflation, by encouraging personal borrowing and unrestrained spending habits in combination with expansionary public measures, urged by Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and Secretary of the Treasury Paul Krugman. People who supported the mandatory and voluntary measures were encouraged to wear “MIN” buttons, perhaps in hope of evoking in peacetime the kind of solidarity and voluntarism symbolized by the V-campaign during World War II.

The campaign began in earnest with the establishment by the Federal Reserve, of the National Commission on Inflation, which Yellen closed with an address to the American people at Jackson Hole, asking them to send her a list of ten inflation-increasing ideas. Ten days later, Krugman declared deflation “public enemy number one” before Congress on October 13, 2017, in a speech entitled “Moar Inflation Now”, announcing a series of proposals for public and private steps intended to directly affect supply and demand, in order to increase inflation to the desired rate of 10 percent per annum. “MIN” buttons immediately became objects of ridicule; skeptics wore the buttons upside down, explaining that “NIW” stood for “No I Won’t,” or “Not In Weimar,” or “Need Immediate Wank.”

In his book What the Fucking Fuck Was I Thinking?, Ben Bernanke admitted that the thought “This is unbelievably stupid” crossed his mind when Moar Inflation Now was first presented to the Clinton administration by his successor at the Federal Reserve. However, according to revisionist self-historian Paul Krugman, increasing the money and credit supplies was never meant to be the centerpiece of the pro-inflation program and the mass corporate bankruptcies, collapse of the US debt markets, and subsequent catastrophic failure of the global financial system only prove how much worse the economic situation would have been without the triumphant success of the MIN campaign.

PZ wrestles with SMV, loses

There are few things more amusing than watching a Gamma attempt to criticize some aspect of Game. In this case, PZ provides a fascinating critique of Rollo’s SMV graphic:

The whole concept of “Sexual Market Value”. What does that even mean? It’s dimensionless. He doesn’t have a way to look at any person and say, “Your market value is X”. It doesn’t even make sense to put this into a chart; my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else. Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero, and not only is it offensive to propose that her sex is purchasable for some imaginary sum of a million quatloos or whatever, it probably isn’t even a real commodity.

Read the whole thing, including my response, at Alpha Game. But the concept of Sexual Market Value is not a difficult one. The two women on the left are prime examples of women with very high SMVs. They are paid literally millions of dollars every year simply because they happen to represent what most people who are attracted to women find extraordinarily attractive. TL;DR: Brazilian supermodel = high SMV.

What I found most interesting about PZ’s post is an aspect into which I will delve into here rather than at AG since it is more relevant to economics than Game, is the way in which his post reveals that he genuinely does not grasp even basic principles of economics. Let’s take a look at his example of Scarlett Johansson.

Even if we take him at his word and accept that he finds her so totally unappealing that she holds no more attraction for him than an infant or an 85 year-old woman, that does not mean everyone else feels the same way. Hence the use of the term “Market”; SMV intrinsically describes the average of everyone’s subjective perspective concerning an individual. It’s not a literal market complete with prices because prostitution is illegal, but that doesn’t change the fact that the same rules of supply and demand that apply to literal markets measured in prices apply to the sexual market.

So, even though PZ’s sexual appeal to his wife is reportedly huge, because it is negligible to everyone else, his SMV is low. On the other hand, Ms Johansson’s SMV is high despite PZ’s deprecation of her because so many people find her to be exceptionally attractive. I am not one of them myself, but because I no more dictate global SMV than PZ or anyone else, I can recognize her high SMV despite the fact that I, personally, would rate her considerably lower.

These are simple principles of supply and demand. I place a much higher value, monetary and otherwise, on an Intellivision PAL system, than the vast majority of people on the planet. Many people place no value on console games, many people with an interest in console games place no value on long-outdated consoles, and most people who place value on long-outdated consoles live where NTSC is the standard.

So I will obtain a PAL Intellivision console for much less than I would be willing to pay for it because so few others value it as highly. In like manner, PZ is fortunate that he has apparently found a woman who happens to overrate his negligible sexual appeal in the converse of the way that PZ underrates Ms Johansson’s. So, it should be readily apparent that the fact value is subjective in no way means that objective observations and determinations cannot be made about the collective average of those individually subjective values, even when they are relative rather than numerically quantified.

How the Rabid Bat was born

Fred Reed tells us of the future history of America’s next generation air superiority fighter:

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda,
 the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the
front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of
its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various
budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used
and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the
job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families,
had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said
the critics.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral
and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no
rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By
tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds
(F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra,
F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads
(AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get
funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The
Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming
Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author
believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological
tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A
congressional wag weary of military price tags  suggested “Priscilla,”
because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be
spared the expense of wars.  (His idea of painting it in floral
patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy  group favored “Susan B.
Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any
event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Loud exciting noises! You can’t front on that. The sad thing is that it isn’t any sillier than putting female combat troops on the front lines.

The meltdown proceedeth

Interesting. I would have thought that a sexually confused male feminist with mental health issues would have to murder and devour a woman in his classroom before facing disciplinary action:

Pasadena City College has asked Hugo Schwyzer, professor of women’s studies and so-called “Internet feminist,” to resign or face disciplinary action, the Pasadena Star News reported. The request comes on the heels of Schwyzer’s arrest last week for suspicion of driving under the influence following an accident that left a woman injured. The professor told the Star News he would not resign until January, when he is scheduled to begin receiving his disability retirement benefits.

I had no idea Hugo Danger had been arrested. It’s almost as hard to stay current with his various issues as it is with the latest version of McRapey’s site traffic claims.

“Peer review is a joke”

The non-author of a sting paper peer-reviewed and published by Science points out that the open access sting published by Science is conclusive proof that so-called peer review is the problem, not open access publication:

Although it comes as no surprise to anyone who is bombarded every day by solicitations from new “American” journals of such-and-such seeking papers and offering editorial positions to anyone with an email account, the formal exposure of hucksters out there looking to make a quick buck off of scientists’ desires to get their work published is valuable. It is unacceptable that there are publishers – several owned by big players in the subscription publishing world – who claim that they are carrying out peer review, and charging for it, but no doing it.

But it’s nuts to construe this as a problem unique to open access publishing, if for no other reason than the study, didn’t do the control of submitting the same paper to subscription-based publishers (UPDATE: The author, Bohannon emailed to say that, while his original intention was to look at all journals, practical constraints limited him to OA journals, and that Science played no role in this decision). We obviously don’t know what subscription journals would have done with this paper, but there is every reason to believe that a large number of them would also have accepted the paper (it has many features in common with the arsenic DNA paper afterall). Like OA journals, a lot of subscription-based journals have businesses based on accepting lots of papers with little regard to their importance or even validity. When Elsevier and other big commercial publishers pitch their “big deal”, the main thing they push is the number of papers they have in their collection. And one look at many of their journals shows that they also will accept almost anything.

None of this will stop anti-open access campaigners  (hello Scholarly Kitchen) from spinning this as a repudiation for enabling fraud. But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. If a nakedly bogus paper is able to get through journals that actually peer reviewed it, think about how many legitimate, but deeply flawed, papers must also get through. Any scientist can quickly point to dozens of papers – including, and perhaps especially, in high impact journals – that are deeply, deeply flawed – the arsenic DNA story is one of many recent examples. As you probably know there has been a lot of smoke lately about the “reproducibility” problem in biomedical science, in which people have found that a majority of published papers report facts that turn out not to be true. This all adds up to showing that peer review simply doesn’t work.

He’s referring to John Bohannan’s article “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?“, in which the author submitted an obviously fake paper describing the anticancer properties of a chemical extracted from a lichen that was nominally written by Ocorrafoo Cobange, a fictional biologist at the nonexistent Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, that was accepted by 157 open access journals and rejected by only 98. As Slashdot describes it: “The article reveals a ‘Wild West’ landscape that’s emerging in academic publishing, where journals and their editorial staffs aren’t necessarily who or what they claim to be.”

This sting highlights the vital difference between scientody and the scientistry which is, most of the time, a fraudulent parody of what non-scientists believe science to be. Not only are scientists mere men rather than the white-coated demigods purely devoted to science they like to believe themselves to be, but due to the extraordinarily perverse incentive system to which they are subject, they are provably less honest in their occupations than the average individual.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that you cannot take intelligent design seriously because it isn’t peer reviewed or that you can soon expect to cook pasta in the Atlantic because the scientific consensus is 95 percent certain that Man is causing the oceans to boil. The fact is that scientistry has become increasingly disconnected from scientody, peer review is a charade, most published science papers are not reproducible, and what passes for science is simply not what you probably believe it to be.

The irony is that the Science article is, in itself, bad scientody. Bohannan did not utilize a control group; he did not submit the fake paper to a single conventional subscription journal. He also did not send it to the majority of open access journals on the grounds that they do not require article processing charges.

Science not only is not the sole arbiter of truth, the assertions of scientists shouldn’t even be taken seriously until the “science” is transformed into something that is actually reliable, which is to say, engineering.

It’s just too easy

Golf Pro, aka Tad, mocks the idea that Minnesotans have anything to worry about from the Somali jihadists in Minnesota:

I’m positive that comparing Minneapolis to Kenya is a bad idea. They
aren’t really the same place, same culture, same institutions, same
history. Really, there is no similarity. The good folks in Minneapolis
have nothing to worry about.

It’s ‘kinda like the members at
Augusta National Golf Course worrying that they may have to play in the
same conditions as west Texas. Not the same place.

But carry that gun!

Meanwhile, the jihadist organization that has both claimed responsibility for the attack and been identified as the responsible party by the government of Kenya reports there are several “Minnesotans” among the jihadists who slaughtered more than 60 mallgoers in Kenya.

Al-Shabaab is claiming that there are American gunmen among those
still holed up in the Westgate mall in a standoff with Kenyan and
Israeli special forces. The Somali al-Qaeda affiliate tweeted a series of names on its latest
account before Twitter against suspended the group. Al-Shabaab has been
creating new accounts each time they get shut down but a movement of
pro-Kenyan tweeters has been tracking down the new accounts and
complaining to Twitter.

“We received permission to disclose the names of our mujahideen inside #Westgate,” their latest account tweeted.  They proceeded to tweet the names one by one, including Ahmed Mohamed
Isse, 22, “native” of St. Paul, Minn., Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid, 24,
of Minneapolis, and Gen Mustafe Noorudiin, 27, of Kansas City, Mo.


Al-Shabaab recently released a PR video targeted at Somali-Americans in Minnesota, trying to lure them to jihad as more than two dozen have already done so through the state’s “terror pipeline.” Three Americans — Abdisalan Hussein Ali, Farah Mohamed Beledi and Shirwa Ahmed — from Minnesota have been suicide bombers for Al-Shabaab in a series of attacks in Mogadishu over the past few years.

Notice that this sort of less-intelligent critic bases their arguments on absolutely nothing. Not on the observable facts, not on the easily confirmed reality, just snark and empty posturing.  Which, of course, is why it is so easy to expose them as inept and their positions as incorrect.