First, a brief history of the space program: As readers of this blog will know well, the Apollo 1 astronauts, like Benazir Bhutto, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and most recently Ted Kennedy, are dead. NASA said it wanted to send them to the moon, but instead they died. Next, NASA tried to kill the Apollo 13 astronauts, who have been immortalized in several conspiratorial Tom Hanks movies. More recently, NASA blew up the Challenger, and for a twofer blew up Columbia.
So it should come as no surprise that NASA recently embarked on an abstruse failed mission to blow up the moon. As explained by Discover Magazine, none of the objectives were achieved. We just incinerated billions of dollars on the surface of an uninhabitable planet (by any relevant standard the moon is a planet). Stephen Hawking has read too many J.R.R. Martin novels; we will never colonize the moon. It was ridiculous anyway for “scientists” to think we could find water in outer space. Outer space is a vacuum, and water is a thing.
As Cicero says to his inamorata, Artemis, “a vacuo abhorret aqua, equo ne credite.”
I have been arguing that the argument of the Bell Curve, that Asians are superior, is a bad argument. Recently a line judge in the Serena Williams – Kim Clijsters tennis match gave (unnecessary) confirmation of my point:
New research has demonstrated that women prefer to mate with men who are already in a committed loving relationship. I have to hand it to Melissa Burkley for doing such a masochistic study with intellectual honesty. Her work shows that in addition to being less intelligent and inferior generally, women are also less moral than men.
Now most would think that this is nothing to worry about; sure, women have evil intentions, but surely no man would fall for it. Yet it turns out that women have an innate ability to dull a man’s cognitive faculties, according to new research. This is precisely how women are able to capture men in their adulterous traps.
Therefore men in relationships should be especially on guard when talking to women and should act on the assumption that they want to commit adultery.
Recent scientific analysis has shown that higher levels of testosterone makes women more likely to have jobs, and furthermore more substantial jobs (say, a banking job rather than a teaching job). This proves the age old folk wisdom that says women are best fit for non-job-related activities, such as creating food or going for walks.
So William Dembski – in addition to histrionically closing discussion after my simple yet devastating objection to his ego-maniacal self-praise made him “weary” – has now deleted my comment altogether on The Panda’s Thumb. Several individuals, including Mr. Tomato Guy, have asked for the original comment. Although my victory over Dembski is now being trumpeted throughout the scientific community, I’ll post it here for posterity.
notedscholar
08/19/2009
11:39 am
Not to burst your bubbles, but this isn’t actually a pro-ID article. It’s more about math than anything else.
Go see over at the Panda’s Thumb where my very, very simple objection to Dembski’s theories makes him go totally berserk and shut off all comments for the blog. Talk about a lack of an open mind.
Why does he claim he shuts them off? Because he is “weary.” In addition to being very womanly (see #7 here), this response to me shows how Dembski absolutely hates peer-review. They always act like they want peer-review, but when they get an actual peer (me) to review them, their brains shut off. Amazing.
We knew robots were smart. And we knew they were evil. But did we know they were dishonest? New research, linked in the last word of the previous sentence, shows that robotic technology tends toward lies. Now you might say, “The robots are lying to each other, not us.” But according to Professor Wendy Berry Mendes, lying to yourself is the same as lying to others. And according to Professor Robert Feldman, liars are everywhere. Ergos, lying robots, if allowed to “evolve” as the original article states, will eventually be everywhere, and lying to everyone. This is horrifying.
Attentive readers will have noticed that I have never before talked about Crows. If you look at this frightening picture you will understand:
"OMG: Crows," by Arthur Rackham, courtesy of Wikimedia
First I heard a terrifying story on NPR, where co-Professors of doom Kevin Mcgowan and John Marzluff explain how crows can single out individual humans for mass rejection by the worldwide crow community. Can you believe it? If you anger one crow, it will squawk at you around other crows, who will then learn your face and squawk at your around more crows, until it gets around to every crow ever born. That’s terrifying. So wherever Professors McGowan and Marzluff go, crows go crazy around them, following them and shrieking at them, rather like Nazgul.
But I wasn’t going to post on it. Yet today I sit down in my Lazy Boy Chair with my cup of coffee, light a cigarette, open up my fresh New York Times on Google News, and what do I see? A horrifying myth come true. Turns out, like the classic Aesop Children’s Horror says, crows will use jagged rocks to raise water levels in order to do things like drink water at the bottom of the pale, or (more likely, says the latest science) gorily tear apart worms with their sharp beaks, probably just to vomit it back up into the quivering and moist mouths of their young.
Speaking of birds regurgitating, let’s bring this full circle to my previous post on the genetic inferiority of Asians:
Attentive readers will recall a post I wrote awhile back introducing the issues of The Bell Curve. I strongly suggest you read, or reread that post, as it is intended as a prelude to the following material.
Chuck Murray and Dick Hernstein argue in The Bell Curve that Asians and their culture are superior to other races and cultures. They do this primarily through an archaic Roman method known as “intelligence testing.” But had Murray/Herstein bothered with reality testing, invented by Freud, they would have realized how very wrong was their conclusion. The proposition that Asians are a superior race is logically incoherent, not to mention demonstrably false. I’ll review some of the evidence for the inferiority of the continent of Asia.
I.1.i. What counts as Asia?
First, some notes on my parameters: by “Asia” I mean primarily the countries of China and Japan, and by extension Mongolia, Thailand/Taiwan, Tibet, and North Korea. I except India (and by extension Pakistan), since Desi culture is both delightful and properly understood as being from the sub-continent, which by definition cannot be Asia. For those of you who cannot read, here is a map with the area of my concern circled in red:
II.2.ii. The Japanese mind is perverse: anime
Anime is perhaps the most disgusting form of art ever conceived. It should not surprise us that anime was invented during the Nazi period, when the Japanese worshiped the sun and committed genocide against their Japanese brothers in Manchuria. According to biologists at the University of Michigan, anime indeed derives from mental defects in the Japanese. For example, “When a character gets extremely mad at something, a stylized vein might appear on their forehead or fist.” This is said by the UM biologists to be “[not realistic],” who quote Kurt Hoffman as saying that “this gets carried to extremes, as in the manga where an identical vein pops up three different places on the back of a guy’s hand.” An much more perverse example is the “bloody nose” in anime. Consider the findings of the UM researchers:
A bloody nose doesn’t mean that a character is actually injured – rather, it means that he (the afflicted character is seldom a she) is thinking lustful thoughts and/or looking at a beautiful woman. But what does the bloody nose have to do with lust? Gilles Portras, author of The Anime Companion, wondered the same thing: “So I asked a few Japanese and got a variety of pseudo-scientific, and occasionally embarrassed, explanations about humidity and blood pressure. But the best response I got was from one fellow who simply recounted that when he was a child he was told by his mother that if he stared at a pretty woman he would get a bloody nose.”
Pseudoscience and child abuse in one package! But without further ado, consider an interesting showcasing of Japanese anime in its aesthetic and narrative perversion:
III.3.iii. The Japanese mind is perverse: game shows
Attentive Internet users will notice that the dictatorship in Japan regularly censor Japanese game shows on Youtube. Nevertheless, a few slivers of truth sometimes shine through, revealing to us the incomprehensible, cruel, pyschotic nature of Japanese real life entertainment. I don’t need to explain, I’ll just post several disturbing examples. Send your children to bed unless you want them to have dreams filled with weirdness.
OMG #1:
OMG #2:
OMG #3:
IV.4.iv. Japanese food is disgusting (and poisonous)
Try ordering food at a Japanese restaurant sometime. Guess what you’ll get instead? Creatures, mostly dead, uncooked, pulled directly out of the ocean.
Consider the following ven diagram showing the mathematical superiority of Western food to Japanese food:
Now, the same principle is true about authentic Chinese food, but unfortunately that comparison cannot be represented visually. Authentic Chinese food, due to the fact that it is, unlike Japanese faux-food, cooked, and furthermore actually colorful, gives the illusion that it is tasty. But the taste is toxic, like something from a landfill, or China.
V.5.v. Asians do not have creative minds
A common myth about Asians is that they are good at the piano. Consider this racial documentary by Ellen Degenerate:
Yet if you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that this cute little Asian girl, like all cute little Asian girls, is actually a robot. Asian children are forced to “learn” piano at a very young age. But then, when they grow up, they end up a travesty like this, capable of only mimicking music from other cultures, producing no creative work of his own. Compare Ellen’s child from the East with the genuinely creative mind of Daniel Johnston:
Or consider this early recording of Bach playing his concerto:
Asians are good at one thing: math and science. Basically they are walking calculators. And the ones that aren’t walking calculators are walking Periodical Tables.
VI.6.vi. Chinese language = incomprehensible
In addition to being partially not really a language, Chinese cannot be understood even by most Chinese people, who obviously can’t memorize 8 billion idiosyncratic symbols, let alone fit them into a grammar. For example, according to John Wycliffe:
[Learning the Chinese language requires] bodies of iron, lungs of brass, heads of oak, hands of spring steel, eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.
In any case, not realizing it is a book or a menu, children tend to scribble all over Chinese writing, making the original image indiscernible. For example:
Wtf?
Some people think that the Chinese language was actually put here by aliens, and that the real reason I can’t understand it is because aliens are by definition superior and more complex than humans. I find this an admirable explanation, and it would also help explain the Great Wall of China, which serves no identifiable human purpose. But as yet there is no evidence. In any case, before deciding Chinese was put here by aliens, we’d have to actually decipher the gibberish.
VII.7.vii. Asians = short
Although liberals deny it, Asians are in fact shorter than the rest of us. This puts them in league with women, an inconvenient truth for the authors of The Bell Curve. Consider the following diagram of an American, an African, and an Asian, ironically juxtaposed against the actual bell curve which is supposed to make Asians superior. Ask yourself how the bell curve makes sense here. It doesn’t.
Based on the inspirational art of Thomas Kinkade
VIII.8.viii. Japanese horror, Lost in Translation, and the future of Asia
Oh I forgot to mention that Asian women have no waist-to-hip ratios to speak of, which shows that Asians are not evolutionarily advantageous. Anyway, I have given a ton of evidence against The Bell Curve through the scientific methods of Cultural Criticism. Murray and Finkelstein, in The Bell Curve, only use pseudo-math called “statistics,” which is a method thoroughly disproven by Joel Best. Twice. And there is plenty of other material out there. Consider for example the perverseness of Japanese horror movies, which are so intellectually and morally revolting that they regularly have to be remade to be viewable by civilized people. Or, if you want a real education, take a look at the host of evidence showcased in the interpretive documentary Lost In Translation. Some people think the portrayal of Asia in that documentary is inaccurate and therefore racist. Well, it’s not.
The Bell Curve, written by Dick Hernstein and Chuck Murray, is the massive tome which fails to construct a theory of everything for explaining the following observable phenomena:
After the publication of The Bell Curve, there was some hype in the British press that such a theory of everything might be possible. Since then – and in the very same British press! – high priest of orthodox physics Steve Hawking has conceded to Pete Woit that such a theory is not even possible.
Bell Curves: The conquest continues
Nevertheless, the pretensions of Murray and Hernstein persist. The legacy of their work is maintained exclusively by Murray, since Hernstein, like Benazir Bhutto, Neil Postman, Heath Ledger, and most recently Michael Jackson, is dead. Granted, Murray has come under heavy beating in the popular media from illegitimate sources, most notably in his rigged debate with very well-regarded creationist fraud Steve J. Gould. The popular arguments against The Bell Curve are well-known. The most ridiculous criticism is that The Bell Curve mistakenly reifies the concept of “intelligence.” Such critics, like Steve Gould and pop-Wiccan cult figure Mal Gladwell, claim intelligence doesn’t exist. But this claim is logically self-defeating. If intelligence isn’t real, then how did we ever find out that it isn’t?
Bell Curves: problems and prospects
There is a much more serious flaw in the argument of The Bell Curve than the supposed holes crank-critics try to uncover. Specifically: the results. What is offensive about The Bell Curve is not that it has false premises or faulty conceptualizations, or faulty methods. Its main problem is that it has false conclusions. Call my approach a G.E. Moore Shift. The primary conclusion I have in mind is Murray/Hernstein’s major thesis that (here I’m quoting the Wall Street Journal) “The Bell Curves for [Asians] are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general.” This is hysterically false. Asians are not superior to whites, and they are probably not even superior to blacks or Hispanics. The amount of data Murry/Hernstein ignore that shows the inferiority of Asians is quite astounding. So astounding in fact, that I will present it in a separate blog post following the blog post you are currently reading with quivering pleasure. The function of this post was to provide some historical background and cultural context to the debate, and to make very clear my pro-evidence bias in any discussion that ensues.
I’ve pointed out before that several of the foundations of electrical engineering, especially subatomic particles, are more mysterious than scientist-witches let on. However, I have not made the connection to technology explicit. Careful readers will be aware of my affinity for Luddite critic Neil Postman who, like Michael Jackson, Benazir Bhutto, and Heath Ledger, is dead. My conclusions about technology are even more unsettling than Postman’s for, combined with his, they demonstrate that Technopoly is actually Cultic Technopoly – for technology in addition to exercising pre-rational control over our culture, is also magical.
My basic claim is that many technological devices in their current states cannot be explained within a consistent historical progression connecting to primitive inventions and discoveries – e.g. fire, the wheel, and language. In this sense technology is irreducibly complex. Put another way:there are evolutionary gaps in the development of technology.
EXAMPLE NUMBER ONE: THE CURIOUS CASE OF CELLULAR TELEPHONES
My first example comes from communication technology, especially cell phones. A long time ago it was discovered that you could talk into a tube and it would help the sound along quite a distance, and someone could hear you on the other end, maybe a few feet away. Then, there was a tangential invention of making lights (fires) light up and little bleeping sounds happen and these could be translated into language. Irrelevant. What I’m really interested in is the development of the telephone. We basically jumped to the development of the telephone. How did we learn that voices could magically – and silently (!) – be transported across great distances, even oceans (!), and come out on the other end completely intelligible? Add to that the fact that millions of voices can exist, perfectly separate and unconfused, in the same tiny thin wire! Add to that the fact that phone lines still work when the power is out and therefore need zero energy to operate! Add to that the fact that phone companies can add people to phone service without adding anything to the wires! Add to that the fact that you could be swimming in the Pacific and run into a phone line somewhere (?). Add to that the fact that there are satallites! How did we get from magically sending endless silent transfigured audio information which morphs back into voices through wires, to magically sending it through the air??!? The air, a.k.a empty space? You’ve got to be kidding me. Sometimes I talk through the air directly, and people don’t understand what I’m saying. What if I try talking to someone in China through the air, where my voice has to make several stops before getting there. Somehow, because of a box I hold into my ear, and some kind of spacecraft allegedly in outer space, and a box in their ear, and big towers with bleeping lights at the top so they don’t get hit by airplanes, they can hear me perfectly. Something fishy is going on here. Where’s the transitional development between talking through a short tube without electricity and talking into a magic box which sends invisible nothings into outer space and back through the atmosphere? What? It’s unbelievable. Wrap your mind around it, you can’t. To fully grasp the massive gaps in the history of technology, consider the diagram below of the evolution of telecommunication.
EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO: COMPUTERS; OR, THE DEVIL’S TOOL Academics are always making the completely asinine claim that such-and-such was the “first computer,” where “such-and-such” often is an abacus, and occasionally the human brain. Sorry, there is not legitimate connection between some guys playing with beads at a table and Google Earth. There are too many differences which cannot be bridged by any transitional cultural technological fossils. For one thing, computers today use electricity, which no one understands. We know how to conjure it, how to stop it from killing us in some cases, and that’s it. Try having a scientists explain electricity to you sometime. It’s complete bullshit (see glossary), like when a theologian tries to explain the doctrine of the trinity. At least the trinity doesn’t use electricity (usually). In addition to the sudden transition from non-electric to electric, there is a transition from visible to invisible. We can all understand simple machines, like windmills or crowbars. But many parts of the computer, most everything aside from the cooling fan, are invisible. Look at a motherboard. What do you see? You see nothing useful. Consider the bizarre photographic representation below.
What do you see? Nothing. Some white lines. A lot of spider-looking things. Some blue strips. A collection of things that look like a toy city, like when you’re in an airplane, and so on. Certainly nothing that looks like what shows up on your computer monitor screen. So how do we get to the point where we can make these things? Certainly none of the parts are useful by themselves. Many people will say: we have robots build them, since our hands are too big to build tiny things. But we built the robots in the first place! And besides, the only way we can tell robots what to do is with computers. And how did we know what invisible things to do on a flat board in order to make movies with Matt Damon appear on a shiny screen (which, by the way, is connected via a single wire)?
Computer technology also lends itself to many reductio ad absurdum arguments. For example, it means that the law of the conservation of things is false. For example, when I download the new Regina Spektor album, what have I added to my computer? Nothing. Magnets have just shifted around or something. Magnets, which by the way are essential to Hinduism. In any case, how can magnets produce Matt Damon’s face anyway? But back to the reductios. In addition to it being absurd that I can create something on my computer out of nothing, a.k.a Ex-Nihilism, it is additionally absurd that I could theoretically create a movie simply by moving magnets around, which hasn’t been created yet. According to computer science this is possible.
A third example of how technology is irreducibly complex which I don’t presently have the time to get into is the video camera, which cannot be explained with any coherency. For one thing, video cameras are supposedly not actually recording motion, they are recording frames of still images. This leads to the conclusion that video cameras are not video camera, a rather Orwellian turn of events if you ask me.
Because we live in a materialistic culture bent on the nihilistic destruction of objective values, many financial advisers tell us to never shop when we are hungry. A quintessential example comes from a Wiccan guru site called the “Money Instructor.” Read the money-loving abominations here. If you scroll down on this page to the section entitled “Don’t Shop on an Empty Stomach,” you will read the following intellectually malnourished drivel:
Don’t shop when you are hungry. People tend to buy more, and a larger amount of the things they don’t need when they are hungry, so always shop with a full stomach. Also, prepare to dress more warmly, since supermarkets are often cold, because the cold temperatures actually makes you hungry so you buy more!
First, I want to start out by putting an assumption of mine out on the table: we need food. In recent years, scholarship has confirmed this.
The mistakes in the above paragraph’s conjectures are so numerous and interconnected that I don’t know how to order my refutations. I’ll just go sentence by sentence, and apologize now for any lack of cohesion. Consider the sentence
People tend to buy more, and a larger amount of the things they don’t need when they are hungry, so always shop with a full stomach.
First, no empirical evidence whatsoever is offered in support of either the explicit claim that people buy more things they need and don’t need when they are hungry, or the implicit claim that being full reduces the phenomenon of buying many and unnecessary things. But let’s say the first claim – that hungry people buy what they don’t need – is true. Given Plato’s Law of Symmetry, will it not also be true that full people fail to buy what they do need? This follows axiomatically.
Next, consider the language game being played with the word “need.” How is this word being employed? It’s not obvious. The author cannot possibly mean need in the Singerian sense, since according to Peter Singer we don’t need money. There is 0% probability that “The Money Instructor” believes this, especially since the function of shopping when you are full is evidently so that you can have more money to bathe in while you are at home.
So obviously The Money Instructor is using “need” in a less severe, but still substantive sense. Maybe “need” is relative,” in the sense of “I need potatoes more than I need ice cream sandwiches.” But Dr. Atkins has proven that potatoes are in fact worse for you than ice cream sandwiches. So perhaps the comparison is celery vs. cotton candy. I “need” celery, because I need a category of which celery is part: “healthy food.” But I don’t “need” cotton candy because it is not part of the category “healthy food.” But wait? Can you taste a straw man? Who eats cotton candy because it is in the category “healthy food?” Answer: psychopaths at MSNBC.
So here’s the crux: We eat cotton candy because it is part of other categories: fun, or human parties, or piety, or some other category. The Money Instructor, and Wiccan nihilists like her, think the only value on mother earth is money, and hording it in your house. If we affirm other values, like making our grandchildren smile, we will acknowledge that purchasing things we don’t need is actually purchasing things we do need. Because we need to make our grandchildren smile.
But back to the pseudo-economics/psychology. Who exactly are you shopping for? Most basically, you are shopping for yourself. Let’s ignore for the moment the reality of guests and grandchildren and girlfriends, since The Money Instructor apparently thinks they don’t exist. Are you shopping for your hungry self or your gorged self? Obviously you are shopping for your hungry self. And solipsism teaches us that no one knows your needs better than you. So by deduction no one knows the needs of your hungry self better than your hungry self. Unless you are an ascetic and think satisfying physical desires is wicked, you can’t resist the force of this argument. If you aren’t hungry, you will rationalize – at the expense of the part of you that actually needs to eat – all sorts of evils, like not buying hummus, or ice cream sandwiches, or bread, or even baby carrots for that matter. You’ll buy two dozen eggs and bottled water and a multivitamin and you’ll steal exactly one paper plate. That sounds horrific, a veritable holocaust of a financial philosophy.
So my advice is: shop when you are hungry. Not too hungry, or else you’ll faint in the store, or hallucinate and buy the wrong things, like Triscuits instead of Club Crackers, or Meijer brand Mac and Cheese instead of Kraft. But shop when you’re in the mood for approximately one hardy meal. Your hungry self will thank you now, three hours from now, and three hours after that. Your midnight hungry self will thank you. Your morning self will thank you. Your guests will thank you. Your grandchildren will thank you. You will have good physical sensations at regular intervals throughout the day. You will not need to take a multivitamin. The only thing you sacrifice is the chance to roll around in your cash that you didn’t spend on chips and salsa. But rolling around in cash is gross, and unusual.
