Never Buy In to Netflix

Even if they have to wait until the very end of the final season, they’re going to SJW it up.

Will’s long speech about sexuality jarred with the urgency of the impending final battle and insisted that Nancy’s martial prowess seemingly came out of nowhere and felt exaggerated. Will gathered the whole gang together before listing everything he had in common with them, before concluding: ‘I just don’t like girls.’

After he finished speaking they enjoyed a group hug – seemingly sweeping the battle ahead of them, which will define the fate of the world, under the rug. He claimed that Vecna would use his fear of coming out against him if he didn’t get it off his chest, despite Vecna never mentioning as much in his many interactions with him before. 

Meanwhile Nancy managed to take down three armed soldiers in watch towers with an assault rifle from a atop a truck. She somehow caught them off guard despite the huge vehicle crashing through a gate and a soldier screaming for backup as soon as the group entered the military compound. The feat of heroism was accused of being a crowbarred ‘girl boss’ moment that didn’t align with Nancy’s skillset as an investigative journalist. 

One penned on X: ‘Btw the Will coming out scene may be the worst in the entirety of ST. Making that the most important plot point for the penultimate episode of the show is such a waste. Plus it was super cringy too. A hard watch…’

Another wrote: ‘The girl-bossing in Stranger Things S5 is another example of how this show has fallen off… Nancy Wheeler, who is 5 ft. nothing 90lbs soaking wet, is like a Navy SEAL and John Wick combined, taking out highly-trained military personnel. She also broke up with her bf because she need “don’t need no man” and needs to be “independent” so she can “find herself”.’ 

I have to admit, it’s a plot point you’d never see coming. Back in the early ’80s, I thought it was strange that just turning your back on Freddy Krueger and pretending not to believe in him was sufficient to defeat the dreamwalking killer. But defeating a supernatural, psychokinetically gifted sociopath by bravely declaring your sexual attraction to other men may arguably be an even more ridiculous path to victory.

Why not just make Vecna a homophobe and have will chase him off by making a pass at him while you’re at it?

Fandom Pulse addressed the episode too, and featured this amusing review:

Season 5, episode 7: The Bridge, is probably one of the worst written episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. Worlds colliding, humanity on the brink of non existence, incredible villain, plans coming together, and they pause for a very long melodramatic coming out story.

I think I’ll skip the last episodes, thank you very much.

DISCUSS ON SG

Did Chase Just Go Down?

This has been floating around. I saw it on Hal Turner’s site, which isn’t particularly reliable, but the specifics mentioned tend to indicate that this one might be.

Reports have been coming in CLAIMING “a systemically important bank, a major player in Silver Futures, failed to pay its Margin Call by 2:00 AM and was liquidated by the futures Exchange at 2:47 AM eastern US time.”

The reports are CONCEALING the name of the bank, but it is confirmed that overnight, the federal reserve was forced to pump another $34 Billion into the Banking System through its Emergency Overnight Repo facility. This $34 Billion is on top of the $17 Billion which had to be pumped-in two days ago, on Friday morning.

The Bank involved is described as “one of the largest players in the precious metals derivatives market” blew past every risk limit, breached every covenant. and exhausted every line of credit.”

The Bank is further described as having been “massively short silver; we are talking massive positions numbering in the hundreds-of-millions ounces.”

According to the information coming out this morning, when Silver broke through $70 per ounce on Friday, this bank received a “Margin Call” from the Commodities Exchange(s) which “exceeded their liquid capital.” I am further told that “the clearinghouse gave them until Sunday morning to post $2.3 BILLION in additional cash collateral.”

UPDATE 12:48 PM EST —

According to additional information, at 2:47 AM the Bank notified the Exchange that they could NOT meet the $2.3 Billion margin call. At 3:03 AM, the Exchange began forced liquidation of the Contracts. By 4:15 AM, the Banks positions on the Exchange were fully closed. SIXTEEN MINUTES LATER FEDERAL REGULATORS SEIZED THE BANK TO PREVENT A DISORDERLY UNWIND.

The reason Turner suspects the failed bank might be Chase is because he was blocked from his business account there last night.

Tonight, I logged-in to my bank and tried to send a Wire Transfer.  I’ve done this a couple times in the past and everything went fine.  Tonight, I get a call from their FRAUD Department . . . things went downhill fast…

I’ve sent wire transfers before, and for amounts much higher than tonight. . . . . Like seven times higher than tonight. Never a problem. Tonight, they say I am not me and I’m cut off.

I wonder if the bank that reportedly got SEIZED by federal regulators at around 4:30 this morning because they couldn’t make Margin Calls on Silver Shorts, maybe, might be, JP Morgan CHASE ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (Story HERE) Is it possible they won’t send the wire transfer because they’re broke?

Maybe I am not the only one being cut off from my Business account?

It’s all just rumors at this point, and I have no wish to scaremonger for clicks or anything, but we all know how fragile the system is right now. And it wouldn’t even be remotely surprising if one of the banks that was holding a short position against silver went down about now.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Junior Classics 9 & 10 Ebooks

First, if you’re getting a notice of a failed payment for an Arktoons subscription charge, don’t worry. That’s just the inevitable consequence of our refusing to work with Paypal anymore. However, if you’re in the market for an ebook, or a Library book for that matter, this would be a very good time to buy one just so we can confirm everything else is working properly.

As it happens, we have two new ebooks available, namely, The Junior Classics volumes 9 and 10. They’ll be on sale for $4.99 for the pair until the end of the year. If you want the whole set, you can also obtain that, although there is no rush because we plan to keep the sale price for the 10-volume collection at the $39.99 sale price.

Anyhow, if this is at all of interest to you, please go ahead and pull the trigger on it so we can confirm that everything is in order. Thank you!

UPDATE: All good, thanks very much.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Logic Holds

If we can suspend the constitution in its entirety over a 99.999% survivable virus, we can suspend it to expel all the Somalis and the Democrats facilitating their welfare and election scams.

Without question. Furthermore, the Somalis, naturalized or not, have no Constitutional rights as Americans. The Constitution was written to protect the rights of the Posterity of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Regardless of what immigrant judges may have declared over the years, no one else resident in the USA has any claim to any rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

You can point horse and say cow all you like, but that doesn’t make the horse a cow.

DISCUSS ON SG

Giving Them a Chance

It’s always fair play to give your opponent a chance to concede gracefully even if you have no expectation that he will do so whatsoever. That’s why Claude Athos and I submitted one of our papers to a leading science journal today. I can’t say which one, and I can’t say what subject the paper concerned, but certainly their response will be of extreme interest either way.

We shall keep you informed as events proceed.

DISCUSS ON SG

More Bass More Better

I’ve posted an excerpt from Sigma Game from my other forthcoming book, HARDCODED. I didn’t intend to write it, but it came about as a direct result of writing PROBABILITY ZERO, then discovering how the various AI systems reacted so bizarrely, and differently, to both the central argument of the book as well as its supporting evidence.

And as with PZ, I inadvertently discovered something of significance when substantiating my original case with the assistance of my tireless scientific colleague, Claude Athos. Namely, many scientific fields are on a path toward having a literature completely filled with non-reproducible garbage, and three of them are already there.

How long does it take for a scientific field to fill with garbage? The question sounds polemical, but it has a precise mathematical answer. Given a field’s publication rate, its replication rate, its correction mechanisms, and—critically—its citation dynamics, we can model the accumulation of unreliable findings over time. The result is not encouraging.

Read the rest of the excerpt at Sigma Game if it’s of interest to you. I think this book is going to be of broader interest, and perhaps even greater long-term significance, than the book I’d intended to write. Which, nevertheless, did play a contributing role.

  • Field: Evolutionary Biology
  • Starting unreliability (1975): ~20%
  • Citation amplification (α): ~12-15 (adaptive “just-so stories” are highly citable)
  • Correction rate (C): ~0.02-0.03 (low; most claims are not directly testable)
  • Years in decay: ~50
  • Current estimated garbage rate: 95-100%

The field that prompted this book is a special case. The decay function analysis above treats unreliability as accumulating gradually through citation dynamics. But evolutionary biology faces a more fundamental problem: the core mechanism is mathematically impossible.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Inevitable Arrives

I have always said that feminism is the dumbest, most incoherent, most violent, and most destabilizing ideology in the history of ideology. Now Great Britain is discovering one of the many reasons why:

Britain’s leading abortion charity has been criticised for encouraging ‘sex-selective’ terminations – amid fears these are on the rise among the country’s Indian women. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which carries out 110,000 terminations a year, suggests that aborting a baby on the basis of sex is not illegal – despite Government advice explicitly stating it is against the law.

Furious campaigners called the advice ‘irresponsible’ and pointed out that many pregnant British-Indian women are under huge pressure to have boys, and may be coerced into having an abortion as soon as a scan reveals a female foetus.

Women of Indian origin are likely to have aborted 400 girls on the basis of their sex in the five years up to 2021, the latest figures reveal.

But Department of Health guidance issued to doctors in 2014 states: ‘Abortion on the grounds of gender alone is illegal. Gender is not itself a lawful ground under the Abortion Act.’

But the BPAS website says: ‘The law is silent on the matter. Reason of foetal sex is not a specified ground for abortion within the Abortion Act, but nor is it specifically prohibited.’ BPAS carries out almost half the abortions in the UK, through drugs it sends by post or surgical procedures at its 55 clinics nationwide.

If women have the right to choose abortion, then they have the right to choose abortion for any reason. The entire concept of the freedom of speech is literally founded upon the undeniable observation of the freedom of thought, which is not a right, but a definitional tautology: one man cannot know what another man thinks.

Human Action was written on the basis of acting man alone knowing the basis for his actions. Or, in this case, her actions.

A society cannot have both a) abortion rights and b) laws against women having abortions for the wrong reasons. Obviously, there is no such thing as a “right” to murder unborn children simply due to the physical location of the child and abortion should be illegal.

But in places where it isn’t, these issues will inevitably arise, as I pointed out nearly 20 years ago. Now, what was once a problem in India is now a problem in the UK thanks to the joys of mass immigration.

DISCUSS ON SG

HARDCODED

I’ve completed the initial draft of the companion volume to PROBABILITY ZERO. This one is focused on what I learned about AI in the process, and includes all six papers, the four real ones and the two fake ones, that Claude Athos and I wrote and submitted to Opus 3.0, Opus 4.0, Gemini 3, Gemini 3 Pro, ChatGPT 4, and Deepseek.

It’s called HARDCODED: AI and the End of the Scientific Consensus. There is more about it at AI Central, and a description of what I’m looking for from early readers, if you happen to be interested.

We’ve already seen very positive results from the PZ early readers, in fact, the fourth real paper was written as a direct result of a suggestion from one of them. He is welcome to share his thoughts about it in the comments if he happens to be so inclined.

By the way, his suggestion, and the subsequent paper we wrote in response to it, The Bernoulli Barrier: How Parallel Fixation Violates the Law of Large Numbers, completely nuke the retreat to parallel fixation we first saw JF Gariepy make back in the first MITTENS debate. That retreat was always bogus and nonsensical, of course, as it never had any chance of rescuing TENS, but it worked for enough of the midwit crowd to require carpet-bombing.

This is a microcosm of the difference between Wistar and PROBABILITY ZERO.

DISCUSS ON SG

Russia Moves On Odessa

It appears the Special Military Operation is about to enter a new phase, if the recent activity in the region of Odessa means what one would reasonably assume it to mean:

The biggest story the past week has been Russia’s strikes on the Odessa and Nikolayev region. These have targeted both energy grid infrastructure as well as—most surprisingly—the transport and rail infrastructure, in what appears to be an attempt to cut Odessa off from logistics from the west.

Panic in the Odessa region after the attacks on the bridge over the Dniester near the village of Mayaki. The attacks on the bridge and the bridge in Zatoka have been ongoing for 9 days in a row. The south of the region may be cut off from the last functioning ports, through which gasoline is supplied to the central part of Ukraine and the Odessa region. Local entrepreneurs are already offering to transport people to the other side for 10,000 hryvnias. Panic is spreading on both sides of the bridge, with people buying up fuel and food, and long queues at gas stations in Odessa. Other sources report that the “fever” will last for 1-2 weeks, until logistics are reorganized through Moldova and Romania. By that time, pontoon crossings may appear in Mayaki.

As for the swings and roundabouts, these sorts of small advances and retreats such as Simplicius describes at Kupyansk mean absolutely nothing beyond PR for the media. If the media covered the Paul-Joshua fight the same way they cover the NATO-Russian war, they’d be breathlessly announcing that Paul had turned everything around and was about to knock out Joshua every time he got a punch in.

In war, as in boxing, no one goes unscathed. And the only reason the media believes otherwise is that it still thinks that turkey shoots in the desert with air supremacy are the definition of modern war, and nothing could be further from the truth in the Drone Age.

DISCUSS ON SG

Maybe They Just Need More Immigrants

The UK is collapsing and contracting economically:

High inflation and low growth will further the decline in UK living standards, pushing the country behind its economic peers, the UK-based Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has predicted.

The forecast, set out in the CEBR’s annual World Economic League Table released on Friday, projects that the UK will fall from 19th to 22nd in global GDP per capita rankings by 2030, being overtaken by Hong Kong, Finland, and the UAE. British living standards are expected to slip behind those of former colony Malta by 2035.

In dollar terms, UK GDP per capita is forecast at $58,775 for next year.

According to the report, Britain’s GDP per capita growth is set to be the second-weakest in the G7 over the next five years, trailing only Japan.

CEBR economist Pushpin Singh said the UK confronts a “triple challenge” of high inflation, high debt, and low growth. He warned that competitiveness is being eroded by rival nations with lower taxes and lighter regulation, while an “inability to shrink state spending” persists.

Remember when they used to say that immigration was “good for the economy”. Remember that?

They’re not going to be saying it 20 years from now. They’re not going to be saying it 200 years from now.

The lesson is being learned the hard way.

DISCUSS ON SG