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.

Why the US is interested in Venezuala

The Saker interviews Michael Hudson to learn why the USA is suddenly so interested in Venezuela, of all places:

The Saker: Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he do right, and what did he do wrong?

Michael Hudson: Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue – mainly from oil, of course – to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity for his electoral constituency.

What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad – while running away themselves.

This was not “wrong”. It merely takes a long time to change an economy’s disruption – while the U.S. is using sanctions and “dirty tricks” to stop that process.

The Saker: What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela – is it primarily due to mistakes by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage, subversion and sanctions?

Michael Hudson: There is no way that Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney’s regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.

By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela’s oil resources and seize its foreign assets much as Paul Singer hedge fund sought to do with Argentina’s foreign assets.

Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile’s “economy scream,” so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a “demonstration effect” to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.

The Saker: What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does not overthrow him) to rescue the Venezuelan economy?

Michael Hudson: I cannot think of anything that President Maduro can do that he is not doing. At best, he can seek foreign support – and demonstrate to the world the need for an alternative international financial and economic system.

He already has begun to do this by trying to withdraw Venezuela’s gold from the Bank of England and Federal Reserve. This is turning into “asymmetrical warfare,” threatening to de-sanctify the dollar standard in international finance. The refusal of England and the United States to grant an elected government control of its foreign assets demonstrates to the entire world that U.S. diplomats and courts alone can and will control foreign countries as an extension of U.S. nationalism.

The price of the U.S. economic attack on Venezuela is thus to fracture the global monetary system. Maduro’s defensive move is showing other countries the need to protect themselves from becoming “another Venezuela” by finding a new safe haven and paying agent for their gold, foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro areas.

The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the ante to move “outside the box.” His plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan – is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S. dollar standard. It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it can emerge from this fight as an honest financial broker, honest banking system and supporter of democratically elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!

In short, Venezuela is another crisis point for US financial imperialism. The inability of Venezuela to take possession of its own gold in London is yet another indication that the neo-liberal world order is increasingly unstable. It's not about the oil, it's about the debt.

It certainly doesn't help that US officials are doing incredibly stupid things, like the Secretary of State calling Juan Guaido "duly-elected" when the man has never even run for President of Venezuela! The two candidates who lost the 2018 election to Nicolás Maduro were Henri Falcón and Javier Bertucci, while Henrique Capriles was the losing candidate in the 2013 election that was also won by Maduro.

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.

1MB is NOT a bug

If you are experimenting with (the thing that shall not be named but will be announced Friday), the 1MB limit on image storage is most certainly NOT a bug. Free accounts get 1MB, which is just enough for an avatar and a header, and not very much more.

More importantly, this approach allows us to defang a major attack vector utilized by anonymous trolls, serial harassers, and monkey-wrenchers on social media sites.

One more thing. If you are an Infogalactic supporter - and thank you very much, all of you - you need to email me BOTH your @name and your support level. I may write 900-page epic fantasy novels without an outline, but nevertheless, I am entirely incapable of remembering every single supporter's precise support level on the basis if their email account. Telling me "my name is X" is great, but it does not tell me whether you are a Bronze, Silver, or Gold supporter.

The support badges and additional text limits are expected to arrive before we announce publicly on Friday.

UPDATE: our payment processor is suddenly taking belated issue with our subscription model because it is technically on a different site, so we have taken down the products from the store while we resolve the matter. If you are already a Burn Unit member, please continue to provide me with your username and support level in order to have your status upgraded.

Maximal mutations

As I promised last night, here are the numbers I utilized in last night's debate on the theory of evolution by natural selection with biologist JF Gariepy:

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

NOTE: These 25 mutations were fixed in parallel. The 1600 generations per fixed mutation represent an average. So, JF's appeal to massive parallel propagation is already accounted for, at least with regards to observed fixation in bacteria.


MAMMALS
Years: 200,000,000
Years per generation: 4.3
Generations per fixed mutation: 1600
Years per fixed mutation: 6880
Maximum fixed mutations: 29,070

NOTE: the bottom number represents the maximum number of fixed mutations from Morganucodontid to Homo sapiens sapiens.


CHLCA
Years: 9,000,000
Years per generation: 20
Generations per fixed mutation: 1600
Years per fixed mutation: 32000
Maximum fixed mutations: 125

NOTE: the 9 million represents the latest average estimate for the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor, which estimate has ranged from as little as 4 million years on the basis of the molecular clock to 25 million years.

Now, the primary problem with JF's appeal to parallel gene propagation is that it requires a minimum of 15,000,000 mutations to become fixed in the human population, and another 15,000,000 mutations to become fixed in the chimpanzee population, and to do so in an amount of time that permits 125 fixed mutations in series.

In other words, there must be 120,000 genes simultaneously fixing throughout the entire population in parallel at all times, and the same process has to happen TWICE. This does not strike me as credible, even if we don't bother questioning JF's claim that the observed genetic differences between human and chimpanzee lie on a spectrum and that not all humans will possess the 15 million mutations that separate Homo sapiens sapiens from Pan troglodytes and that not all chimpanzees possess the additional 15 million mutations that separate Pan troglodytes from Homo sapiens sapiens.

Or, to put it more simply, there have been 450,000 chimp and human generations since the CHLCA. Based on the number of mutations observed fixing in parallel in the Nature study, that would permit 562 total fixed mutations in that time frame. Which is only 29,999,438 short of the approximate number observed.

I understand that some people are disappointed that I did not drive these points home during the debate, or that I did not answer JF's rhetoric with any rhetorical killshots of my own. But JF is not, and has never been, my target. I'm hunting much bigger game. That being said, I will analyze his program and make use of it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Evolution debate tonight

Just a reminder that I'll be debating biologist JF Gariepy tonight at 7 PM EST on The Public Space. Place your bets; JFG's fans appear to be of the opinion that I will be, and I quote, "rekt".

I am, to the contrary, entirely confident that I will be presenting a critique of TENS that is, at the very least, an uncommon one, and possibly even a unique one, seeing as how it comes from an economics perspective. The only question, as far as I can tell, is if I am somehow failing to account for a critical component, otherwise, I see as little likelihood that orthodox biologists will be able respond to my critique any more successfully than free trade economists responded to my labor mobility argument.

UPDATE: buckle up. Here is the link to the debate.

VERDICT: It was a very interesting and useful conversation, in my opinion, more of a mutual exploration than a debate per se. JF quickly understood where I was going and correctly focused on the point that the simple statistical model does not address, which is the rate of parallel propagation of the mutations that become sufficiently fixed to become an ongoing part of the population. What I felt that he failed to grasp was that we were talking about maximum possible propagations, so even the addition of the parallel propagating is unlikely to provide enough padding to allow the theory to fit within the time limits.

And, as I noted, if the parallel propagating is happening as quickly as it is required in order to account for the necessary changes, we should be able to observe it more readily in the laboratory as well as in the wild.

I'll post the summary of the crude fixed mutation model tomorrow.

The Boston Herald scalps Warren

Big trouble for Fauxcahontas. HEAP big trouble:

Stick a fork in cold crab omelette — the fake Indian is all done now.

She speak-um with forked tongue one time too many, and now The Washington Post, of all places, has scalped her. The smoke signals went out last night — as early as 1986 she was lying on a Texas bar application that she was “American Indian.”

Lieawatha admit-um she talk with forked tongue, only she use white-eye language, calling it “furthering confusion.”

No confusion anywhere. You are an utter fraud. Fake Indian, you will have many moons to reflect on your serial lies. Never will you be great white father.

Never live-um in white tee-pee. Heap big fraud since buffalo roam the plain, blue-eyed squaw lie about DNA, to make-um more wampum.

So the Boston Globe story last fall claiming she’d never tried to pass as an honest injun, was as phony as a Kevin Cullen column. But hey, it’s the Globe — right, Mike Barnicle? Jason Blair? Patricia X. Smith? Why do you think the fake Indian went to a fake news rag to print her buffalo excrement?

Ugh. And that’s not the only bad news. The incredible bunko artist is busted on this morning. In an unrelated develop, Sen. Elizabeth Warren may be getting sued over some more of her despicable lies.

Because this time she put her shameful falsehoods in a tweet, not in an employment application to Harvard or UPenn law school. Hard to deep-six a tweet, especially one as perniciously false as the one she sent out last month about the Covington Catholic High School students who was accosted first by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites in D.C., and then by a nutty Indian — a real Indian, to be clear, but a fake Vietnam veteran, like Sen. Richard “Stolen Valor” Blumenthal.

This is good news for Horrible Harris, and by extension, for the inevitable Trumpslide 2020.

76 percent approval

The news media is in shock:

CBS News and CNN released instant polls taken immediately after President Trump’s State of the Union address with both polls finding 76 percent of those who watched approved of the speech. The CBS poll 72 percent approved of Trump’s immigration proposals while the CNN poll showed 76 percent approval with 59 percent “very positive.”

Hence all the civnattery in the State of the Union. The fact that civic nationalism is both incoherent and nonexistent doesn't take away from the fact that it is very, very popular among the electorate, especially the white electorate. And the God-Emperor is, and has always been, a civic nationalist.

This is precisely why I have said, from the days before the South Carolina primary that established him as a serious candidate, that Trump was the best that the USA could hope for, although he would probably not be capable of preserving the USA as a viable, singular political entity. But at least he is moving in the right direction, which marks a sea change in every president since Eisenhower.

What he is accomplishing here is expanding his base, leashing the Republican Establishment, and strangling Never Trump prior to the 2020 election. This will give him more leverage for Building the Wall and Draining the Swamp during that time.

The State of the Union

What Union? Anyhow, this would be your open thread for the God-Emperor's address tonight.

God and the pursuit of happiness

Religious faith is not a psychological problem. To the contrary, it is the lack of religious faith that appears to be the psychological problem.

In the United States, 36 percent of the actively religious describe themselves as “very happy,” while only 25 percent of the inactively religious and 25 percent of the unaffiliated self-identify in this way, Pew revealed.

Similarly, in Japan, those who are religiously active are significantly happier than the religiously inactive and the unaffiliated, with 45 percent, 34 percent, and 31 percent respectively being “very happy.”

In Australia, the gap is wider still, with 45 percent of the religiously active reporting being very happy, as compared with only 33 percent of the religiously inactive and just 32 percent of the unaffiliated.

Man is not made to live without limits, purpose, or meaning. And religion provides all three.

Sweet journo tears

Learn to code, baby. Just learn to code. The ride never ends.

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

Color me dubious

The US Left appears to be protesting too much:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared in public Monday night, her first public outing since her lung cancer surgery last December. Ginsburg, 85, attended a concert celebrating herself titled, Notorious RBG in Song, that featured her daughter-in-law, soprano Patrice Michaels. Attendees said Ginsburg looked, “glam”, “magnificent” and “great”. One man who said he spoke with and was hugged by Ginsburg said she looked “resplendent”.

Actually, she does look pretty great. I wouldn't say convincing, quite, but she does resemble a living human being. More or less.

Burn Unit 2.0

Infogalactic is pleased to announce that it is now possible to join the Burn Unit and support the Planetary Knowledge Core through the Arkhaven store. Three levels of subscription are available, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and all three come with enhanced features and capabilities on our new SocialGalactic system, to which Alpha access will be announced this week to all Burn Unit and Brainstorm members.

We're also working on providing a coupon to a discounted Burn Unit t-shirt at Crypto.Fashion.

Please note that if you are already a member of the Burn Unit, there is absolutely no need to switch over unless you prefer to use your credit card instead of Paypal. All current members of the Burn Unit will receive the same access to SocialGalactic as the new members.

In answer to anticipated questions, yes, we will soon be able to offer support for the Darkstream and Voxiversity through the Arkhaven store, although I have to see about delivering the promised benefits to the existing supporters before setting that up. We are also working on an Audible-style system of purchasing audiobooks, but that is turning out to be more complicated if we do not wish to have a system that is not entirely manual.

Thank you for your staunch support of the Planetary Knowledge Core. In an age of endless historical revision and SJW memory-holing, we believe it is a vital tool for the preservation of the history and knowledge of Western civilization. Please note that by doing so, you are not only supporting the technology fronts, but are also helping provide strong infrastructural independence to Castalia House and Arkhaven as well.

No one really cares

That's the one thing you can reliably count on. The masses simply don't care enough about anything to ever take action unless they are starving. Techcrunch explains why so few people quit Facebook and Google... and by extension, Amazon and Twitter.

Privacy advocates will tell you that the lack of a wide boycott against Google  and particularly Facebook is symptomatic of a lack of information: if people really understood what was happening with their data, they would galvanize immediately for other platforms. Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.

I don’t believe more information would help, and I reject the mentality behind it. It’s reminiscent of the political policy expert who says that if only voters had more information — if they just understood the issue — they would change their mind about something where they are clearly in the “wrong.” It’s incredibly condescending, and obscures a far more fundamental fact about consumers: people know what they value, they understand it, and they are making an economic choice when they stick with Google or Facebook .

Alternatives exist for every feature and app offered by these companies, and they are not hard to find. You can use Signal for chatting, DuckDuckGo for search, FastMail for email, 500px or Flickr for photos, and on and on. Far from being shameless clones of their competitors, in many cases these products are even superior to their originals, with better designs and novel features.

And yet. When consumers start to think about the costs, they balk. There’s sometimes the costs of the products themselves (FastMail is $30/year minimum, but really $50 a year or more if you want reasonable storage), but more importantly are the switching costs that come with using a new product. I have 2,000 contacts on Facebook Messenger — am I just supposed to text them all to use Signal from now on? Am I supposed to completely relearn a new photos app, when I am habituated to the taps required from years of practice on Instagram?

Surveillance capitalism has been in the news the past few weeks thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 704-page tome of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps (credit scores and the reporting bureaus are a whole other beast). There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.

One of the lessons I have learned — perhaps the most important you can learn about consumer products — is just how much people are willing to give up for free things. They are willing to give up privacy for free email. They are willing to allow their stock broker to help others actively trade against them for a free stock brokerage account with free trading. People love free stuff, particularly when the harms are difficult to perceive.

As a general rule, if your plan involves "waking people up with the truth", it's going to fail. If you consider that even Jesus Christ himself could not change a petty regional power structure with the truth, you probably shouldn't count on anything else changing on that basis either.

Darkstream: The Revolutionary Phenotype

Tonight I interviewed JF Gariepy about his ideas concerning the deeper mechanisms of evolution by natural selection. We had some technical difficulties getting started due in part to my unfamiliarity with Hangouts and its settings, but you can watch it here.

Suing the SPLC

Gavin McInnes is striking back at the left-wing organization that has weaponized defamation:

Talk show host Gavin McInnes has filed suit against the hyperpartisan Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) this week. The 61-page complaint was electronically filed early Monday morning in the Middle District of Alabama outlining defamation and other tortious acts resulting in reputational and economic damages.

The Canadian-immigrant talk show host is demanding an apology from the left-wing SPLC for purposefully misrepresenting his beliefs in a defamatory manner and the defamatory mischaracterization of a fraternal club he founded, Proud Boys.

McInnes is being represented by noted First Amendment attorney Ron D. Coleman of Mandelbaum Salsburg P.C. and Baron Coleman of the Baron Coleman Law Firm.

This is exactly the right thing to do. None of the whiners who cry about deplatforming but fail to pursue legal action are ever going to accomplish anything, because the Left knows no shame and could not care less about being called hypocritical.

If more people would do the same, Big Social would be considerably less inclined to think it could get away with actions that blatantly violate their own terms and policies.

The next neocon target

It's an interesting confession of neocon weakness in the aftermath of the Syrian debacle that they are presently targeting Venezuela instead of another Middle Eastern state. But, as the Saker points out, Russia is not in a position to help defend the Venezuelans as they defended the Syrians from imperial aggression:

I am getting a lot of emails suggesting that Russia might do in Venezuela what she did in Syria. Let me immediately tell you that this is not going to happen. Yes, there are a lot of Russians in Venezuela, but the “Russians are not coming”. For one thing, I will never cease to repeat that the Russian intervention in Syria was a very small one, and that even if this small force proved formidable, it was really acting primarily as a force multiplier for the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Syrian government forces. And yet, even the deployment of this very small force necessitated a huge logistics effort from Russia whose military (being a purely defensive one) is simply not structured for long-distance power projection. Syria is about 1000km from Russia. Venezuela is about 10 times (!) further. Yes, I know,a few Tu-160 visited the country twice now and there are Russian advisors in the country and the Venezuelans have a few pretty good Russian weapons systems. But here, again, this is a game of numbers. Limited numbers of Russian-made combat aircraft (fixed and rotary wing), air defense missiles or even large numbers of advanced MANPADs or assault rifles won’t do the trick against a determined US-Colombian invasion. Finally, there is no Venezuelan equivalent to Iran or Hezbollah (an outside ally and friend) which would be capable and willing to deploy real combat forces for actual, sustained combat against the invader.

I can't help but suspect that Trump has something up his sleeve here. Is he throwing the neocons into a tar baby, perhaps? Is there anyone, anywhere, who is buying the inept imperial rhetoric about the democratic legitimacy of an unelected foreign puppet?

And it is bizarre that the USA is posturing as if it is going to fix a third-world failed state when it is rapidly transforming into one itself. Apparently the plan is for a second New American Century, albeit in South America now that the Middle East plan has failed.

The opposite of boring

I have no idea why people thought last night's Super Bowl was boring. To the contrary, it was one of the most exciting, cerebral games in the history of the sport.

The Rams’ defensive coordinator, Wade Phillips, had matched McDaniels’ calls all night. Mostly, the Patriots could do nothing against the Los Angeles sub defenses. Because the Rams’ front was so formidable with pile-pushers Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh, they could afford to play one or two extra men in the back end and limit Tom Brady’s passing options with three strong corners. So McDaniels told his men they were just going jumbo, which would force Phillips out of his sub packages and put linebackers on receivers the Patriots trusted could beat them.

McDaniels would keep only one small player on the field—Julian Edelman. And on the next series, he’d play two tight ends (the lightly used Allen and Rob Gronkowki), a fullback (James Devlin), a big back (Rex Burkhead) and Edelman.

“It was a pretty amazing thing,’’ said Allen, one of the beneficiaries of McDaniels’ invention. “Hats off to the Rams. They really knew us. They played us great. But football’s about in-game adjustments. Josh told us on the sideline, ‘We did not practice this at all coming into this game, and I realize that, but this is going off in my head, and it’s something I think we need to do.’ “

The Patriots had averaged 4.9 yards per play in the first 50 minutes of the game. On this drive, they averaged 13.8. New England played what it considers its athletic big offense, and it worked. Gronkowski beat linebacker Samson Ebukam up the right flank for 18 on first down, then hit Edelman on linebacker Cory Littleton for 13, then Burkhead in the left flat for seven, then Gronkowski between Littleton and Mark Barron down the left seam for 29. Sony Michel subbed in for a two-yard touchdown run. Five plays, 69 yards, TD. Pats, 10-3.

Afterward, Bill Belichick praised McDaniels as much as I’d heard him praise any of his coaches. Belichick called the McDaniels change a “real key breakthrough,” and said McDaniels “made a great adjustment,” and called his play-calling “outstanding, as usual.”

One of the things the more casual fans of the game don't understand is that a team's ability to "make adjustments" is very limited by the fact that they have to have practiced the plays to which they are going to switch, that's what it means to have a game plan. A game plan is essentially a book of plays that the team has repeatedly practiced that week, and there may not be another team in the league with an offensive roster capable of switching completely to formations and plays that are not in that week's game plan.

Part of that is because New England makes such drastic changes in its game plans from week to week. Even if the jumbo package wasn't a part of the Super Bowl game plan, there were times this season when it was a major part of the weekly game plan so the players were at least familiar with the plays involved. A second part is that New England has the smartest roster in the league, so the players are able to make the necessary changes without being confused or out of position or mixing up their assignments even when running plays they haven't practiced. And the third part is that McDaniels has the confidence and courage to make such a high-risk call, one that most head coaches, let alone offensive coordinators, would never, ever make.

Remember, most coaches won't even go for it on fourth down for fear of criticism. Imagine how much flak both McDaniels and Belichick would have taken for abandoning the game plan in a tie game in the fourth quarter deep in their own territory if something had gone awry.

As for the commercials and the halftime show, who cares? That's all nonsense for the non-fans. I didn't see any of that stuff.

Italy imposes sanity

Italy has the sanest government in the West:

Rome has effectively derailed an EU statement meant to recognize Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim leader if President Nicolas Maduro fails to set up snap elections, a Five Star Movement source confirmed to RT. Italy announced the veto at an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers that started on January 31 in Romania, the source said. The statement, which was supposed to be delivered by EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini recognized Guaido as interim president if snap elections were not held.

It's amazing to see 5 Stars aggressively following the nationalist tone being set by La Lega's Salvini. Or Santo Matteo, as he is increasingly being called.

And while the EU is at it, perhaps it should note that Macron is a less legitimate national leader than Maduro.

Super Bowl LIII

This is your open thread to discuss Super Bowl LIII between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams.

Houston, we have a stalker

It was interesting to see Camestros Felapton was stalking my profile on LinkedIn yesterday. It looks like he created a profile just for that purpose. Meanwhile, another File 770 denizen, ex-Amazon Principle Research Scientist Greg Hullender, is instructing SJWs on how they can attempt to interfere with Castalia House and other publishers who sell through Amazon in the future.

Greg Hullender on February 1, 2019 at 4:59 pm said:

I was a senior manager at Amazon in the division that managed the catalog. I can guarantee you that no one outside that team can really delete anything from the catalog. The programs that others run only mark things deleted, but they don’t really go away.

Likewise, accounts don’t really get erased. They get frozen and the money put on hold until someone can figure out whom it really belongs to. (This was an IP theft accusation, if you believe VD’s account, so of course they held the money.)

Once it was straightened out, they quickly put everything back the way it was. (Considering that the database had over 2 billion records in it when I left the company 5 years ago, it’s pretty impressive how well it works, if I do say so myself.)

He may be telling the truth about what was told to him. It’s possible he got someone who just didn’t know how to reinstate a deleted account. (Or someone without the privilege to do so.) Someone new enough to simply not know that whatever was done can be undone. (With just a few caveats.)

As I think about it, if you wanted to make this happen to him again, the way to do it (assuming he created another “misleading” book like this) is as follows:

1. Purchase the book yourself.
2. A few days later, submit a return request to Amazon, alleging that you received a counterfeit. (I forget the exact code, but it’s a checkbox that indicates you got something other than what you thought you ordered.)
3. In the comments, mention the book you wanted to get and include a link to VD’s own words explaining what he did. Make it clear that “this was a deliberate fraud. Amazon shouldn’t tolerate this.”

Any customer service rep would refund you at once and kick it straight up to Fraud. Fraud would look at the info, see that the account has been suspended repeatedly, and instantly suspend it pending further investigation. Or so I believe, since I’ve seen the same thing happen to other merchants who skirted the line a lot. (E.g. gray-market sellers whose ads make it look too much like the original product. Or refurbished-product sellers who aren’t clear enough it’s not new.)

It's fascinating to observe such an influential ex-Amazon employee providing instructions on monkey-wrenching Amazon's core business. Needless to say, we've archived this post and forwarded screenshots of Mr. Hullender's advice to our contacts at Amazon so they are aware that Mr. Hullender and his associates may attempt to interfere with Amazon's attempts to sell books to their customers in the future.

Chuck Dixon's Avalon trilogy at Arkhaven

The first three issues of Chuck Dixon's Avalon are now available in high-quality, DRM-free CBZ format on the Arkhaven store. A Kindle-format edition is also included with each digital edition sale, in case you happen to prefer that format. Each issue retails for $2.99.

Meanwhile, Ben is understandably getting impatient:

When the hell is the next book coming out? You're turning into rrrr Martin.

It's an understandable comparison, though I don't believe it is a fair one. I would remind Ben and others who are impatiently waiting for more epic fantasy that I have an obligation to those who are so generously supporting my other projects. And those projects, in order of the level of their support, are as follows:

1. Arkhaven (specifically AH and AH:Q, but also including Swan Knight Saga) 
2. Infogalactic
3. Darkstream/Voxiversity

Now, I very much enjoy working on The Arts of Dark and Light. It is a literal labor of love. It is the best thing I have yet written. But how can I justify taking so much time away from actual commitments that it hinders my ability to deliver on them, especially when I'm late on several of them as it is?

Furthermore, there is an important principle of reinforcing success and abandoning failure that must always be kept in mind. Non-fiction works such as SJWAL and Jordanetics each sell 6x more copies than novels like A Throne of Bones or Quantum Mortis, and they take CONSIDERABLY less time to write. I have a family to support, and as the Darkstream viewers know, considerable vet bills to pay. Selenoth is very far from a failure, but neither is it a commercial success on the scale of Arkhaven or even the Darkstream. So, I simply can't justify spending very much time on indulging myself by working on the epic fantasy saga.

Readers also demanded more Quantum Mortis and I managed to find a way to deliver a lot more without taking up too much of my time. We will be announcing at least one new, and very large, Quantum Mortis project this year about which QM fans will be extremely excited, particularly those who have enjoyed the Wardogs Inc. trilogy. It's going to be awesome. But that's not an option for TAODAL. I can't simply do an outline and bring in a co-author or two to crank out three or more volumes.

Here is the primary problem with the "Vox RR Day" meme: whereas George Martin is rather spectacularly failing to deliver on what pays his bills, I'm actually delivering on what pays mine. That's why Corporate Cancer will come out before the extended version of A Sea of Skulls, and that's why the next two big announcements we make will not be related to Selenoth in any way. And, of course, it doesn't help me finish ASOS sooner when I'm having to spend so much time on things like Indiegogo and Amazon, to say nothing of building an alternative print/ebook/audio distribution channel, even though I'm very, very glad that we have done so and that so many of you have enthusiastically opted for it.

All that being said, I very much appreciate the continued passion for, and the interest in, TAODAL. Remember, I love it too. I continue to work on A Sea of Skulls and I am very pleased with the way it is progressing, though not the rate at which it progresses, and there will be a happy, though not entirely unanticipated, surprise for Selenoth fans this week.


TECH NOTE: for those having trouble with MP4 audiobook format, please read this guide to using it on the various platforms.

CBS rejects "Just Stand" ad

Deplatforming doesn't happen because you are a bad individual with evil ideas. It happens because those with the ability to silence you fear the power of your message:

A veteran-owned apparel company’s pro-flag Super Bowl TV ad that punches back at Nike's promotion of Colin Kaepernick and his national anthem protests has been rejected by CBS.

According to the firm, Nine Line Apparel, CBS was apparently not satisfied the firm could pay for the 45-second ad, despite having annual revenues of $25 million. A spokesman for Nine Line charged that CBS didn’t like the ad’s content.

The ad features soldiers, first responders, and images of military graves decorated with American flags and gives credit to them for protecting the rights of those like Kaepernick to protest.

Remember, Free Speech was always a fake principle. The Enlightenment was not merely a fake philosophy, it was a complete lie designed to undermine Christian society.