Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Lori Lightfoot Just Keeps Digging in Interview Defending Racist Media Policy

“I think, in this one day, when we are looking at the two-year anniversary of my inauguration, as a woman of color, as a lesbian, it’s important to me that diversity is put front and center,” she said, defending her position. “If I, as the black woman mayor, the first ever, don’t challenge us – the collective us – to do better, to really make sure that, in every institution, it reflects the diversity, and nuance, and texture of our city, then shame on me.”

Then truly, shame on you, Mayor, because when you are avowedly blocking people because of their skin color; you are not talking about diversity, you are being racist.

She’s judging people based on the color of their skin. It’s the opposite of diversity. You’re not challenging “us” to do better; you are just straight up doing worse. Really, stop already. You’re just making it worse, when you try to defend this nonsense.

The interview suggests what this is really about is a media avoidance strategy — that she just doesn’t like coverage that she’s gotten from some outlets.

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The graveyard of meaningless terms has gained another resident: “Science”

Back in 2014, HuffPost ran an article that discussed 12 words that have been so overused and misused that “they really don’t mean anything anymore.” Words like “literally,” “awesome,” “honestly,” and “unbelievable” all rightly made the list.

I’d like to submit a 2021 revision, suggesting that we add the word “science” to the archive. Whatever it once meant, over the course of this last year mankind has watched it be sautéed, filleted, and utterly obliterated on the altar of Covid, face masks, and vaccines to the point it has become void of any objective definition.

Just in recent days the butchery of science has become epic.

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Research findings that are probably wrong cited far more than robust ones, study finds

Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions.

Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

The finding – which is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny – has led the authors to suspect that more interesting papers are waved through more easily by reviewers and journal editors and, once published, attract more attention.

“It could be wasting time and resources,” said Dr Marta Serra-Garcia, who studies behavioural and experimental economics at the University of California in San Diego. “But we can’t conclude that something is true or not based on one study and one replication.” What is needed, she said, is a simple way to check how often studies have been repeated, and whether or not the original findings are confirmed.

The study in Science Advances is the latest to highlight the “replication crisis” where results, mostly in social science and medicine, fail to hold up when other researchers try to repeat experiments. Following an influential paper in 2005 titled Why most published research findings are false, three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in the Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world.

Working with Uri Gneezy, a professor of behavioural economics at UCSD, Serra-Garcia analysed how often studies in the three major replication projects were cited in later research papers. Studies that failed replication accrued, on average, 153 more citations in the period examined than those whose results held up. For the social science studies published in Science and Nature, those that failed replication typically gained 300 more citations than those that held up. Only 12% of the citations acknowledged that replication projects had failed to confirm the relevant findings.

The academic system incentivises journals and researchers to publish exciting findings, and citations are taken into account for promotion and tenure. But history suggests that the more dramatic the results, the more likely they are to be wrong. Dr Serra-Garcia said publishing the name of the overseeing editor on journal papers might help to improve the situation.

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We’re All Targets of the Biden Administration’s New Pre-Crime Surveillance Program

Recently, the Biden Administration announced the establishment of what is essentially a pre-crime surveillance program. This program comes as no surprise to those of us with any concern for our civil rights as we saw this coming a thousand miles away. 

Of course, the program will combat “violent domestic extremism” and “violent white supremacy.” (Because all those years of blaming Muslims was just to get silly white people to give up their rights so the surveillance and police state could be turned back on them.) 

Who is running this pre-crime surveillance program?

The new office of pre-crime is called the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. (CP3) is run by the Department of Homeland Security. However, John W. Whitehead has pointed out the DHS is “notorious for:

  • militarizing the police and SWAT teams
  • spying on activists
  • dissidents and veterans
  • stockpiling ammunition
  • distributing license plate readers
  • contracting to build detention camps
  • tracking cell phones with Stingray devices
  • carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities
  • using the TSA as an advance guard
  • conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners
  • carrying out soft target checkpoints
  • directing government workers to spy on Americans
  • conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers
  • carrying out Constitution-free border control searches
  • funding city-wide surveillance cameras
  • utilizing drones and other spybots

Sounds very “Minority Report,” right?

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