Tag: trainwreck

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.

So Facebook is child rape

Just when you thought “near-rape” and “regret rape” were as silly as it was going to get; now a woman desperate to escape the consequences of her actions is attempting to elevate “posting legal pictures online” to the status of rape:

When Holly Jacobs sent nude photographs of herself to a long-distance
boyfriend she loved and trusted, the 23-year-old woman never imagined
the horror that would befall her. In August 2009, less than a year after the pair mutually ended their
three-year relationship, Jacobs did a Google search of her name and
discovered the naked photos on a so-called “revenge porn” website.

“I just went completely into shock,” said Jacobs, who hired a lawyer
and eventually changed her birth name from “Holli Thometz” to Holly
Jacobs.

“This is cyber-rape,” Jacobs, now 30, told FoxNews.com. “It’s all
about the guy having control over the woman and exploiting her in a
sexual way — the same way real-life rape does that. It violates you
over and over again.”

What came next was perhaps more shocking to Jacobs. Police in Miami,
where she lived at the time, took no action. They told her that “because
you are over 18 and you consented, technically they are his property
and he can do whatever he wants with them,” she recalled.

It is sadly unsurprising that a woman would find centuries-old laws concerning private property to be shocking. Apparently we are in the process of entering the time of juris sensus, in which the way a woman feels about something, anything, is the primary legally determinative factor.

It is manifestly obvious that having naked pictures online does a woman no material harm at all. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of women, actually profit from it. Hundreds of thousands more knowingly and intentionally post pictures of themselves for nothing more than the ego gratification. This whole campaign tends to strike me more as humblebrag than horror.

Moreover, it would be absolutely insane to try to make a law against this sort of thing. As usual, the woman desperate to erase the evidence of her past behavior and her white knights of both sexes aren’t even beginning to consider the consequences.  Think about it: we already have a problem with parents occasionally falling afoul of child pornography laws due to posting cute or funny pictures of bathtime on Facebook.

Now recall that children can’t consent. So, if posting pictures taken with consent is rape, how much worse is it to post pictures taken without consent? Of underage children! In one fell swoop, one woman with poor judgment in men is attempting to turn hundreds of thousands of American mothers into child rapists.

It is, technically, true

Obama points out that raising the debt ceiling does not, in itself, increase the national debt:

Raising the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the nation’s debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today. In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it’d been done so many times in the past:

“Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress.  It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.”

Obama went on to suggest that “the average person” mistakenly thinks that raising the debt ceiling means the U.S. is racking up more debt: “It’s always a tough vote because the average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we’re running up our debt, so people don’t like to vote on it, and, typically, there’s some gamesmanship in terms of making the President’s party shoulder the burden of raising the — taking the vote.”

It’s true.  Just like increasing your credit limit on your credit card doesn’t increase the amount of money you owe; you don’t owe more money until you go out and spend more.  However, the fact that you are asking for a higher credit limit does, in most circumstances, indicate that you intend to spend more money than you presently can.

I’m going to miss the Obama administration.  I knew it would be amusing and incompetent, but I had no idea he would take it to this level.

Explaining the Flynn Effect

I think this philosophy of testing may explain the dichotomy between the fact that people are getting progressively more intelligent according to IQ tests while becoming observably more stupid in terms of their behavior:

In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum
coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that
getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can
explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong
answer.

“Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain
their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really
in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture
but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on
the how,” August says in the video.

Mailvox: the futility of cancer

Nate explains both why left-wing parasites are driven to take over organizations and why their takeovers always end in the eventual demise of the organization:

They never learn. They don’t understand civilization, and they don’t
understand power. That’s why they are never able to successfully build
organizations in the first place. So they have to take over the
organizations others have already built and try to use them for their
own goals. They think that the organization itself… the name… is
what makes it relevant. So they imagine if they can just get control of
it… all that power will be theirs.

So they break the very tools they are planning to use to fix the world.

Then
they stand there with a dumb look on their face… trying to drive a
nail with a broken hammer… and cannot understand why it isn’t working.

This process is as true of the Episcopalian Church and the Boy Scouts of America as it is of the SFWA.  Some believe that destruction was always the aim, but I don’t think that is true of the average parasite who joins an organization. I think in most cases they genuinely wish to “improve” the organization and do not understand that their desired improvements will kill it.

I’ll write more on this in the next day or two, in my response to NK Jemisin’s call for further “reconciliation”. What is interesting is the way in which Nate’s description here perfectly describes her approach to “improving” SF/F.

Their analytical abilities don’t appear to exceed that of the average cancer cell. The current SFWA is rather like a collection of cancer cells congratulating themselves on how much they have improved the body they are inhabiting and celebrating the way in which they have driven most of those disgusting, unprofessional white blood cells out.  And it is not hard to imagine their alarm when suddenly the body that sustains them begins to cease functioning, for no particular reason at all.

This is something that the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling may wish to keep in mind, lest it one day find itself going the same route as SFWA.  And speaking of SASS, the organization released a statement entitled: “Statement on the expulsion of a member by another writers’ organization“

In response to requests for comments regarding the decision of another writers’ group to formally expel a lifetime member, SASS Secretary and spokesman Lou Antonelli makes the following statement:

“Although the subject in question was exercising his free speech rights under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, that has nothing to do with the standards of conduct and behavior within a private organization

“Like any private club, the organization in question is allowed to police its membership according to its regulations and bylaws. This is an internal discipline issue and not a matter of concern to the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling.

“The by-laws of the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling clearly state that members should not discuss religion or politics within its auspices, and its members are expected to treat each other with respect. Those are our bylaws, and each group operates according to its own bylaws and policies.

I note that not only does SFWA have no standard of conduct and behavior, but it previously had one that was, if I recall correctly, junked during the Russell Davis administration.  As the SFWA’s statement demonstrated, the current Board believes it can throw anyone out of the organization at any time for no particular reason at all.  If I hadn’t made it clear to everyone that I was the member to whom the statement referred, no one would outside the SFWA Board and its confidants would even know with certainty who the expelled member was.

Of course, it would certainly be amusing if the Board’s assumptions turned out to be incorrect, would it not?  Because in that case, I would not even be expelled at all. And it occurs to me that someone inclined towards conspiracy theory might even conjecture that the reason the SFWA Board refused to publicly identify the expelled member is because they know very well that the expulsion was not legitimate, that it was a sham expulsion, and they are attempting to avoid being sued for damages once the illegitimacy of their action is established.

Cease and desist

Michael Shermer’s lawyers ordered PZ Myers to immediately retract his public allegations of rape at a science conference, but based on the fact that no retraction has yet been made, it appears PZ intends to ride or die with the unidentified accuser.

This firm represents Michael Shermer. It recently has come to our attention that you have made, published, broadcasted, and are continuing to publish and broadcast on your blog numerous false, defamatory, libelous, inaccurate, and/or misleading statements about Mr. Shermer.

We are informed that on or about August 8, 2013, you authored and posted an entry on your blog entitled What do you do when someone pulls the pin and hands you a grenade? The Entry contains numerous false and defamatory statements about Mr. Shermer based on certain unsubstantiated allegations purportedly made by an unidentified woman against Mr. Shermer….

As you are the author of one of the most popular science blogs in the World Wide Web, we find your self-proclaimed intentions “to do the right thing” by publishing unproven and unsubstantiated allegations of forced or nonconsensual sexual intercourse against Mr. Shermer to be outrageous and inexcusable.  It is not accident that the Entry containing these extremely inflammatory and defamatory statements about Mr. Shermer has garnered your blog the highest number of comments of any entry in the history of your entire Blog and you clearly stand to benefit substantially from the posting of these unsubstantiated allegations against Mr. Shermer, all while under the appearance that you have some higher ethical purpose for doing so. Clearly, no matter how reasonably foreseeable it is that your actions would result in serious harm to Mr. Shermer’s name, reputation, and character in the science community, you have chosen to injure and humiliate Mr. Shermer by publishing and posting defamatory statements and comments about him.

Here is the entire letter in PDF form. What a pity this was a science conference instead of a science fiction one, or the SFWA’s Pink Gestapo could have waddled to the rescue.

I have absolutely no idea what did or did not happen, but based on the sort of women who attend science conferences and hang out with atheists, I would be very, very leery about putting too much confidence in a secondhand version of events.

First Hugo Danger, then PZ/Shermer. One would assume McRapey’s inevitable meltdown is lurking on the horizon. However, I don’t think he’ll be the next SFWA member accused of sexual assault at a conference. My money is on Jim Hines, aka McCreepy.  His volunteer counseling reminds me of the elementary school teacher with the mustache who is always pestering parents to let him take their little boys camping with him.

At this point, I find it hard to believe that any men risk attending conferences where there are going to be a lumpening of avowedly feminist women. It strikes me as playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in the chamber; these women are absolutely dying to be able to cry harassment and tell the story of their victimization for the rest of their lives.

The State does not “protect” children

Given the horrific reports that repeatedly surface from every so-called “Child Protective” service, it is eminently clear that the State should play absolutely no role in how parents raise their children or have any ability to remove children from their parents and extended families:

A foster parent in Milam County is in jail charged with murder after the two-year-old girl she was taking care of died in her custody. According to Rockdale police, emergency crews responded to Sherill Small’s home in Rockdale when they received a 9-1-1 call on Monday evening stating that a child was not breathing and unresponsive. The child, Alexandria Hill, was flown to Scott and White McLane Children’s Hospital in Temple where she was placed on life support.

Doctors determined that Alexandria had brain hemorrhaging and retinal hemorrhaging in both eyes. Detectives said the explanation Small, 54, gave of the child’s injuries were not consistent with the nature of the injuries determined by the doctors. The child was removed from life support on Wednesday and Small was arrested for murder the following day. Small admitted to authorities that she threw Alexandria to the ground…..

According to court records, Alexandria’s mother had a medical condition that does not allow for the child to be left alone with her. The TDFPS also received allegations that Hill used marijuana on a regular basis and on one occasion Hill almost dropped Alexandria while going down the stairs of the home as he was trying to hand the child to his sister. During the month of November, Alexandria was being cared for by her paternal grandmother before the State intervened on Nov. 26.

It doesn’t matter how bad the parents are.  If they commit a criminal act that merits prison, then guardianship of the children should be given to the nearest relatives, not to people whose only interest in the children is pecuniary.  There are evil and abusive parents, but the percentage of them is much lower than the percentage of evil and abusive people in the foster care system.

Predators go where the prey is. The fact that they can also arrange to get paid while being provided access to their victims is an indication that the system is entirely insane.  As for the idea that the system is regulated, well, so are banks and motor vehicles and we all know how efficient the State is with them.