It must be hard to be a Chinese or Russian strategist these days. I imagine their superiors in the military and government are tired of always hearing the same advice. “Just wait, don’t do anything, Clown World will destroy itself. It’s inevitable.”
The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains grounded, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline.
The devastating technical fault caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British airports since Covid.
NHS England said patients should not to attend GP appointments unless informed otherwise due to problems with the system used to schedule appointments, while train passengers have been told to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’. In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a makeshift whiteboard to record departures.
Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
Cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error that hit Microsoft 365 apps and operating systems and said a ‘fix has been deployed’. The American firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.
Since sanctions and seizures have worked so well against Russia, Clown World’s brilliant strategists are planning to utilize the same effective economic weapons against China.
NATO officials are discussing taking action to reclaim some Chinese-owned infrastructure projects in Europe should a wider conflict with Russia break out in the east of the continent, three officials involved in the discussions told CNN.
A decade ago, when Europe was still crawling out of the economic crater caused by the global financial crisis, the promise of infrastructure funding from Chinese-owned investment firms seemed like a major windfall.
Now, with the largest land war being waged in Europe since World War II – and the West warning of Beijing’s support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – NATO countries now see those investments as a liability, with allies beginning to discuss ways to reclaim some of those projects, the officials said. The fear, according to one US official, is that Beijing could use the infrastructure it owns in Europe to provide material assistance to Russia if the conflict were to expand. The goal, officials said, is to figure out a path forward well in advance of any potential conflict…
From rail lines connecting Eastern Europe to China, to ports located in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, China has funded tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments under its Belt & Road Initiative, which European nations began signing onto in 2013.
So, this should end well… It goes without saying that this is an economic catastrophe, and probably a military catastrophe as well, in the making. The sooner Americans and Europeans throw off their disastrous, destructive, and wicked ruling elites, the better chance they will have of seeing their nations survive to the 22nd Century.
Biden calls Zelensky ‘President Putin’ to his face in biggest gaffe yet then calls his No2 Kamala Harris ‘Vice President Trump’ – as Ukraine leader cancels press conference and more top Democrats urge 81-year-old to end White House race.
It’s fascinating to see how they keep rolling out the least capable of the Bidens for the biggest public events. It’s as if the Patriots might actually be in control. The one way Trump can be certain to win even what is supposed to be a fixed election is to run against a demented and obviously incapacitated opponent.
And if they don’t 25th Biden, thereby forcing Kamala to run against Trump, Biden will be easy to beat too.
UPDATE: George Clooney is not speaking in metaphor. Never assume metaphor when a servant of Clown World is speaking.
“The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010…He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020…He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate”
John Scalzi finally addresses the accusations of sexual assault against Scientologist Neil Gaiman. Sort of.
I learned about the sexual assault allegations involving Neil Gaiman at the same time as everybody else. I don’t know any more about it than anyone else. Everything I have read about it to this point makes me angry and unhappy and sad.
I understand there are people who want a different public statement from me about this than Gaaaah what the actual fuck. Maybe those people are better at processing bad news involving a friend.
Deep. Meaningful. Insightful. And, as we expected, totally devoid of any criticism or disavowal of Mr. Tubcuddle’s admitted actions.
And still not a peep out of File770 or Tor.com aka Reactor.
They’re either going to have Biden so cranked up on stimulants that he’ll be hopping around the stage like a kangaroo on crack and shouting “whooo” more often than a college freshman after downing her first cocktail or they’re planning to introduce Biden #6.
Citing sources, CBS News told their audience to “expect some surprises” on Biden’s “physical performance” at next week’s presidential debate. President Trump and Joe Biden will face off in the first presidential debate next Thursday. The debate will be hosted by CNN in Atlanta. “I’m told that we should expect some surprises as well because this is such a critical performance for Biden. Not only on the content but his physical performance,” CBS News said.
I have to admit, this is the first thing that has actually made me consider the possibility of watching the Trump-Biden debate… or, as is much more likely, some of the highlights after the fact.
The State Department has allowed the delivery of US weapons to Ukraine’s Azov Brigade, whose members have openly espoused ultranationalist and neo-Nazi views. The flow of arms had previously been restricted due to the unit’s ties to hateful ideology.
“After thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the US Department of State,” the agency said in a statement to the Washington Post on Monday, referring to legislation that bans military aid to units that are implicated in human rights violations.
This is why the conservative fetish for “exposing” or “revealing” Clown World’s hypocrisy is totally futile and accomplishes nothing. Hypocrisy is one of Clown World’s core virtues. They don’t seek to avoid their inverted anti-virtues, to the contrary, they revel in them and enjoy rubbing them in the faces of the genuinely virtuous.
I have to admit, while I was confident that all the true believers in the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection were going to do their level best to avoid every doing any of the simple math required by MITTENS (Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection), I didn’t realize they were going to go so far as to literally deny the applicability of mathematics to what can now only be described as “the magic of evolution”.
Whitelightning777:Humans and chimps only differ genetically by 1% or so. That’s hardly revolutionary. When zoos have to do surgery on primates, the vets often consult human surgeons for expert advice. Go to a zoo. Look at the hands of chimps. A common ancestor is obvious. There is no way that’s a coincidence!! Just the fact that chimps can learn sign language ought to show a recent divergence. The fact that they can use human metallic tools shows that the brain also works in a similar fashion, just that chimps still aren’t quite as smart as humans, about what a 3 to 5 year old child can do. Look at the difference between wild carp and goldfish. Living things can be pressured to change structure rapidly when circumstances create the pressure to do so.
Spacebunny: You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can’t do math, nor do you understand the significance of the numbers given. No, they could not have done any such thing “a few million years ago”. It is literally mathematically impossible.
Whitelightning777:Both a 1% to a 10% difference or maybe even more could be accomplished over a period of 2 to 4 million years. The main issues are what factors exactly drove this natural selection and how much pressure was exerted upon humans by nature, animal predators and other human species attacking each other. By the way, neanderthals weren’t necessarily as nice as we all seem to think.
James Dixon: The math says no.
VD: 1.23 percent of the human genome means 37,500,000 unique base pairs specific to humans. Now, tell us how long it would take to mutate and fixate that degree of genetic disparity…
Whitelightning777:First of all, the majority of your DNA is essentially junk. The exact percentage is disputed but can be as high as 90%. Small genetic changes can quickly lead to huge differences. Over a few million years you don’t have to change very much from one generation to the next. The ABILITY to evolve, genetic flexibility itself is something that nature selects for. Creatures that can’t evolve are usually extinct. The multiple numbers of human races attest to our genetic flexibility. The modern races are only a few hundred thousand years old & have meaningful differences in health and IQ, although the extent is disputed. If our species lost it’s ability to evolve, it wouldn’t be able to split off into races either. Chimps themselves also have different races and species. Bonobos behave very differently from other chimps, even though they can all interbreed.
Dirk Gently: So, in other words, you don’t even comprehend what Vox is saying
Whitelightning777:Vox is setting a “math trap”. This is a device used by creationists. What Vox fails to realize is that 90% of that DNA is junk and that there is no upper limit to how fast evolution and generic change which can occur so long as the offspring survives and is able to reproduce. What Vox fails to realize is that a creature that can only evolve slowly will go extinct, falling behind and losing out to those with more generic flexibility.
VD: A “math trap” is a simply a basic calculation used by people who are numerate. It’s not witchcraft, no matter how opaque it may be to you. There absolutely is an upper limit to how fast mutated genes can fixate. Evolution by natural selection, biased mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow is utterly impossible by the very fastest rates of fixation ever observed in the wild or in laboratories. I will put the problem in two very simple analogies so you might be able to understand the problem.
If someone tells you the score of a professional baseball game is 562,987 to 3, you know the score is incorrect. If someone tells you he walked from New York City to Los Angeles in 34 minutes, you know he is lying. And when someone tells you that the 37.5 million human-specific base-pairs in the human genome were mutated and fixated by natural selection in less than 10 million years, you know they are absolutely wrong. Your junior high logic will never bridge that gap. It cannot. Because it is based on incorrect and impossible premises.
Whitelightning777:MATH DOESN’T APPLY to evolution.
VD: Of all the absurdly retarded statements I’ve ever seen on every form of social media dating back to the bulletin boards of the 1990s, this is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most retarded. Congratulations. Even the kid who thought bacon came from rocks was simply ignorant. But this assertion actually required enough brainpower to contemplate the concept, think it through, and then reject the idea that mathematics necessarily applies to a process that is conceived to take place over a quantifiable period of time.
Whitelightning777:Let’s keep this simple. The only math that matters with evolution is that the birth rate of a particular lifeform exceeds the death rate or barring that is at an equilibrium. Creatures for whom the death rate exceeds their birth rate are dysgenic. Creationist trick boxes are neither required nor desired.
VD: You’re literally retarded.
You don’t have to be retarded to… well, yes, at this point, it is abundantly clear that you do have to be literally retarded to believe in evolution by natural selection. As you can see, the challenge posed to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis by MITTENS is so overwhelmingly devastating that the evolutionists have to abandon not only science, but math itself, in order to cling to their outmoded, outdated, and disproven explanation for the observable diversity of life.
This is a quote from the 1966 Philadelphia symposium, but it is precisely the same sort of argument that any substantive critic of Neo-Darwinism keeps running into from the Neo-Darwinians:
Combinations of different genes occur such that every individual is a unique combination, and the selective assay of the value of each random mutation is performed simultaneously in this framework for thousands of mutations at a time. The acceptance of the neo-Darwinian concept of evolution appears to be eminently valid on this basis. However, a critical feature is the occurrence of mechanisms for genetic combination and recombination, and a major criticism of the neo-Darwinian concept which has been raised at this meeting is premised on the lack of such a mechanism in the initial steps of the evolution of a “sense” sequence of a polypeptide or polynucleotide from an initially “nonsense” sequence. It does not, however, seem an extreme extrapolation from the known facts of nucleic acid replication and transcription to envisage that combination and recombination are inherent features of polynucleotides, and the evolution of “sense” sequences then becomes a process of reasonable probability. – Dr. Alex Fraser, Professor of Genetics, University of California Davis, California
Let’s break the argument down into its component parts:
There is no mechanism. This is readily admitted.
This lack of a mechanism renders the hypothesis impossible.
But it doesn’t strike the Neo-Darwinian true believer to be an extreme extrapolation to imagine what this nonexistent, never-observed mechanism could be if it existed, which it doesn’t.
And if we simply imagine that this nonexistent mechanism existed, then the proposed process that requires it in order to function becomes theoretically possible.
Therefore, the process works as imagined
What sort of philosophical ineptitude and logical retardery is this? Who is stupid enough to accept this as a legitimate argument, let alone an established fact? This isn’t science, reason, logic, or math, it’s just maleducated handwaving combined with wishful thinking. They’re playing poker with Uno cards.
Evolution isn’t science. It isn’t even philosophy or religion. It’s just the vacuous rhetoric of the innumerate, as even its leading champions were forced to admit at the end of the 1966 symposium.
I hope the biologists have shown the physicists that evolutionary theories are not totally vacuous. I think the physicists have shown us that they are certainly as yet very incomplete, and I think we are ready to realize they are very incomplete. – Dr. C. H. Waddington, Institute of Animal Genetics, Edinburgh
The fundamental problem in dealing with scientists in general and biologists in particular is that they literally do not know how stupid they are. Very, very few, if any, of them are even National Merit-level intelligence, which is to say they are not only sub-geniuses, they are relatively low-level midwits. And this was true of them sixty years ago; imagine how much dumber today’s diversity scientists are, especially given their decidedly-inferior modern educations:
The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D.S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C.H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must only be apparent. Ernst Mayer observed that Ulam’s calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that ‘Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.’
“The Darwinists were trying to be reasonable, but it was as if Ulam had presented equations proving that gravity is too weak a force to prevent us all from floating off into space. Darwinism to them was not a theory open to refutation but a fact to be accounted for, at least until the mathematicians could produce an acceptable alternative. The discussion became particularly heated after a French mathematician named Schützenberger concluded that ‘there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.’ C.H. Waddington thought he saw where this reasoning was headed, and retorted that ‘Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation.’ Schützenberger (and anonymous voices from the audience) shouted ‘No!,’ but in fact the mathematicians did not present an alternative.”
Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 1991
Now, if it’s not immediately apparent how fundamentally retarded this scientific illogic is, imagine that instead of debating the validity of a scientific theory, these gentlemen were in a court of law, and that Waddington was the prosecutor, Schützenberger the defense attorney, and Sir Peter Medawar the judge.
Schützenberger: Your honor, my client could not have committed the attack on the late victim, which the surveillance cameras confirm took place in Philadelphia at 10 PM on April 15th. We have here an airline ticket from Philadelphia to Miami on April 15th that left Philadelphia at 7 PM and landed in Miami at 9 PM, affadavits from fellow passengers and airline stewardesses testifying to my client’s presence on the flight to Miami, and security camera footage from the Miami Hilton at 10 PM, all of which clearly proves my client is not guilty because he was not in Philadelphia at the time the murder took place.
C.H. Waddington: So your argument is simply that the victim was killed for his money!
Schützenberger: No, that’s not my argument. I am not making any argument about the motivations for the murder and I don’t know who was responsible for it. My argument is that my client did not kill the victim. My client could not have killed the victim. It’s not possible for my client to have killed the victim, because the murder took place in Philadelphia at a time when it has been conclusively demonstrated that he was in Miami!
C.H. Waddington: But if the accused didn’t kill the victim, who did? Who is the culprit? What’s the alternative?
Schützenberger: I have no idea. I don’t have an alternative.
C.H. Waddington: Your honor will note that I’ve asked for an alternative theory and the defense refuses to provide one.
Sir Peter: Noted. Is that the best you can do, counselor? Do you have any alternative to the active theory, any alternative at all? I will remind you that the active theory is a consensus that is widely supported by the scientific community, a consensus based on the assumption that your client did, in fact, kill the victim.
Schützenberger: Finding the actual killer is not my job, your honor. I’m a defense attorney, not a detective.
Sir Peter: The counselor will answer the question.
Schützenberger: No, your honor, I do not have an alternative theory.
Sir Peter: Very well. Since no alternative theories have been presented, I have no choice but to pronounce the accused guilty. Bailiff, take him away!
That would be totally absurd, doesn’t it? An absolute parody of justice, truth, and reason. No prosecutor would even attempt to advance such an obviously stupid argument in front of any judge. And yet, that is absolutely, 100-percent confirmed to have been the actual state of what passes for scientific thinking on the subject of evolution for the last sixty years. Don’t ever give scientists even a modicum of intellectual respect on the basis of their profession. Not only have they not earned it, they have repeatedly and reliably demonstrated that their level of philosophical analysis and their ability to discern truth is considerably below that of trial lawyers and public defenders.
Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the attempt of one true Darwinian believer to defend the science on the basis of criticizing my math, which apparently pains him, even though he admits there is no mathematical error.
I’m no biologist, and I do enjoy math. It pains me to see bad math, which is the only reason I keep on poking at this. Ultimately, it’s not even a math error, the error is in the priors. Asserting that 1600 fixations per generation is the highest possible fixation rate is the root.
The reader will, I hope, note that the actual number concerned is not “1600 fixations per generation” but rather “Generations per fixed mutation: 1600”.
BACTERIA Years: 3,800,000,000 Years per generation: 0.000071347 (37.5 mins per generation) Generations per fixed mutation: 1600 Years per fixed mutation: 0.114 Maximum fixed mutations: 33,288,000,916
Source: Sequencing of 19 whole genomes detected 25 mutations that were fixed in the 40,000 generations of the experiment. NATURE, 2009
Maximal Mutations, Vox Day, February 7, 2019
I’ll admit that I probably use the description “reprehensibly stupid” too liberally, but this sort of multi-level stupidity really is reprehensible.
