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.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday called for the “total annihilation” of Rafah and other cities in the Gaza Strip.
“There are no half measures. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ – there’s no place under heaven,” Smotrich said.
Smotrich’s reference to “Amalek” was from a line in Deuteronomy, a book in the Hebrew Bible. Amalek is a nation the ancient Israelites were commanded to destroy, and in the book of Samuel, the Israelites were told to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously compared Gaza to Amalek, which has been cited as evidence of genocidal rhetoric in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
I’m not sure that “Putting the NAZI in Ashkenazi” is a particularly great campaign program, but then, I don’t know much about Israeli politics these days. Hitler’s rhetoric went over fairly well in his time, after all.
However, I think it’s bizarre to see conservatives, Boomers, and conservative Boomers to be complaining that American college students are protesting against the genocidal actions of the Israeli government when the IDF is literally killing tens of thousands of Palestinians while top Israeli government officials are openly calling for a literal genocide of an entire people.
The Gazacaust isn’t going to be forgotten any faster than the Holocaust was, so Israelis had better get used to the idea of paying reparations to the Palestinians and their descendants for at least another 70 years.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains “rock solid” among member states. “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership,” Blinken told reporters in Brussels.
If Ukraine will become a member of NATO, Russia has no reason to stop the war until Ukraine no longer exists as a sovereign state. Perhaps that’s the goal. Or perhaps this is simply what hubris looks like before nemesis appears.
Now that the Ukrainians are running out of men, Clown World puppet in France has apparently been ordered to offer up 20,000 more bodies to the charnel house in Ukraine.
France is ready to face whatever developments unfold internationally and is prepared for the “toughest engagements” to protect itself, the chief of staff of the French Army, Gen. Pierre Schill, said in an interview published on Tuesday.
In recent weeks, French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly refused to rule out Western troops being sent to Ukraine at some point to help Kiev in its fight against Moscow, which he described as an “adversary” of Paris.
France’s forces are “ready,” Schill told Le Monde, stressing that “whatever the developments in the international situation, the French can be convinced: their soldiers will respond.” Schill said France has “international responsibilities” and is linked by defense agreements to “states exposed to major threats,” and must therefore have its forces trained and interoperable with allied armies.
The general said that France currently has the capacity to commit a division of around 20,000 men within 30 days and has the means to command an army corps of up to 60,000 which includes allied divisions.
At the same time, the government of France is actively harassing, investigating, and even arresting hundreds of its healthiest and finest young nationalists, the very sort of young men who would make for its most effective soldiers, precisely none of whom are ever going to lift one single finger in defense of the corrupt Clown World regime that is persecuting them. The entire post-1968 program of that regime, like the post-1965 regime of the United States, has effectively destroyed the military capabilities and international significance of France, which is why even fifth-rate African powers are now successfully expelling the last remnants of the French colonial influence of the last two centuries.
The only thing the French Army is ready for in Ukraine is comprehensive defeat to a degree that will make Napoleon’s deadly winter retreat from Moscow look like a stroll after a picnic in the springtime.
NATO in general, and France in particular, doesn’t have the manpower, the strategists, the tactical training, the experience, the airpower, the anti-air, the artillery, or the manufacturing capabilities to seriously contest a war with Russia alone, let alone the full global power of the Sino-Russian alliance that dwarfs the NATO alliance’s capabilities in everything except aircraft carriers, satellite technology, and possibly nuclear submarines.
Simplicius rather amusingly demonstrates that Macron’s grasp of the power imbalance between France and Russia doesn’t even rise to the level of a retarded neoclown with zero knowledge of military history.
Macron showed his dangerous hubris by reciting the trope about Russia being a middling gas station with nukes:
“Putin has a discourse of fear. It should not be intimidated, we don’t have in front of us a great power. Russia is an average power with a nuclear weapon, but whose GDP is much lower than that of Europeans, lower than that of Germany, of France.”
Of course, leave it to a Rothschild banker to not understand how PPP index works for trade surplus countries.
The Russians have made it clear that any French forces sent to Ukraine will be “a priority target”.
According to information coming to the Russian SVR, a contingent to be sent to Ukraine is already being prepared. Initially, it will include around 2,000 troops.” The Russian intelligence chief further said the French military “fears that such a large military unit cannot be transferred and stationed in Ukraine unnoticed. It will thus become a legitimate priority target for attacks by the Russian armed forces. This means that it will suffer the fate of all the French who have ever come to the Russian world with a sword.
What presently passes for our current Clown World elite is not particularly dangerous because they are satanic sociopaths with no regard for human life and a fanatic devotion to inversive evil; in this they are no different than the previous generations of their wicked predecessors. What makes them so dangerous is that, unlike their predecessors, who had to be wary and cunning in order to survive and execute their objectives, these silver spoon satanists have never known anything but easy lives of hedonism and high status. As a result, they are relatively stupid, poorly educated, and genuinely believe their own nonsensical rhetoric.
