Vox Popoli: 2020-08-30

The Forge of Tolkien Episode 6: A Taxonomy of Dragons

When is a dragon "dragon enough" and when is it an example of "draconitas"? In this episode, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown explores the "wilderness of dragons" Tolkien invented for his children's stories and contrasts them with the argument he makes for taking dragons seriously in his essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." How is Smaug like and unlike Beowulf's bane? And how many dragons are there in a "wilderness"? Word of warning: if you ever visit The Hobbit Museum in Switzerland, do NOT ask about dragons. You will be treated to a long lecture on the taxonomy of dragons, including a detailed explanation on why the so-called "dragons" of A Game of Thrones are not, in fact, dragons at all.

The lawyers for The Hero Kyle Rittenhouse have released a statement concerning the events related to the wrongful arrest of their client in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And be warned, if you're going to run the tedious conservative Smart Boy black pill routine, you're just going to be spammed.

After Kyle finished his work that day as a community lifeguard in Kenosha, he wanted to help clean up some of the damage, so he and a friend went to the local public high school to remove graffiti by rioters. Later in the day, they received information about a call for help from a local business owner, whose downtown Kenosha auto dealership was largely destroyed by mob violence. The business owner needed help to protect what he had left of his life's work, including two nearby mechanic's shops. Kyle and a friend armed themselves with rifles due to the deadly violence gripping Kenosha and many other American cities, and headed to the business premises. The weapons were in Wisconsin and never crossed state lines.

Upon arrival, Kyle and others stood guard at the mechanic's shop across from the auto dealership to prevent further damage or destruction. Later that night, substantially after the city's 8:00 p.m. curfew expired without consequence, the police finally started to attempt to disperse a group of rioters. In doing so, they maneuvered a mass of individuals down the street towards the auto shops. Kyle and others on the premises were verbally threatened and taunted multiple times as the rioters passed by, but Kyle never reacted. His intent was not to incite violence, but simply to deter property damage and use his training to provide first aid to injured community members.

After the crowd passed the premises and Kyle believed the threat of further destruction had passed, he became increasingly concerned with the injured protestors and bystanders congregating at a nearby gas station with no immediate access to medical assistance or help from law enforcement. Kyle headed in that direction with a first aid kit. He sought out injured persons, rendered aid, and tried to guide people to others who could assist to the extent he could do so amid the chaos. By the final time Kyle returned to 2 the gas station and confirmed there were no more injured individuals who needed assistance, police had advanced their formation and blocked what would have been his path back to the mechanic's shop. Kyle then complied with the police instructions not to go back there. Kyle returned to the gas station until he learned of a need to help protect the second mechanic's shop further down the street where property destruction was imminent with no police were nearby.

As Kyle proceeded towards the second mechanic's shop, he was accosted by multiple rioters who recognized that he had been attempting to protect a business the mob wanted to destroy. This outraged the rioters and created a mob now determined to hurt Kyle. They began chasing him down. Kyle attempted to get away, but he could not do so quickly enough. Upon the sound of a gunshot behind him, Kyle turned and was immediately faced with an attacker lunging towards him and reaching for his rifle. He reacted instantaneously and justifiably with his weapon to protect himself, firing and striking the attacker.

Kyle stopped to ensure care for the wounded attacker but faced a growing mob gesturing towards him. He realized he needed to flee for his safety and his survival. Another attacker struck Kyle from behind as he fled down the street. Kyle turned as the mob pressed in on him and he fell to the ground. One attacker kicked Kyle on the ground while he was on the ground. Yet another bashed him over the head with a skateboard. Several rioters tried to disarm Kyle. In fear for his life and concerned the crowd would either continue to shoot at him or even use his own weapon against him, Kyle had no choice but to fire multiple rounds towards his immediate attackers, striking two, including one armed attacker. The rest of the mob began to disperse upon hearing the additional gunshots.

Kyle got up and continued down the street in the direction of police with his hands in the air. He attempted to contact multiple police officers, but they were more concerned with the wounded attackers. The police did not take Kyle into custody at that time, but instead they indicated he should keep moving. He fully cooperated, both then and later that night when he turned himself in to the police in his hometown, Antioch, Illinois.

Kyle did nothing wrong. He exercised his God-given, Constitutional, common law and statutory law right to self-defense.

However, in a reactionary rush to appease the divisive, destructive forces currently roiling this country, prosecutors in Kenosha did not engage in any meaningful analysis of the facts, or any in-depth review of available video footage (some of which shows that a critical state's witness was not even at the area where the shots were fired); this was not a serious investigation. Rather, after learning Kyle may have had conservative political viewpoints, they immediately saw him as a convenient target who they could use as a scapegoat to distract from the Jacob Blake shooting and the government's abject failure to ensure basic law and order to citizens. Within 24-36 hours, he was charged with multiple homicide counts.

Kyle now has the best legal representation in the country. With help from Nicholas Sandmann attorney L. Lin Wood, Pierce Bainbridge and multiple top-tier criminal defense lawyers in Wisconsin immediately offered representation to Kyle.

Today, his legal team was successful in working with the public defender to obtain a several-week continuance of his extradition hearing to September 25th. This at least partially slows down the rush to judgment by a government and media that is determined to assassinate his character and destroy his life.

Kyle, his family, the team at Pierce Bainbridge and his other lawyers intend to fight these charges every step of the way, take the case to trial and win an acquittal on the grounds of self-defense before a jury of his peers.

The legal fees and other costs of Kyle's defense will be provided through donations to #FightBack Foundation Inc., a Texas 501(c)(4) foundation created by John Pierce and Lin Wood to protect lawabiding American citizens whose rights are being trampled on by state and local governments that are more concerned with appeasing mobs than protecting those rights.

It's a funny meme. But the best rhetoric is always rooted in the truth. And this is very, very good rhetoric. Because it points to the real reason that the global elite is so determined to stop President Trump's inevitable reelection. Speaking of good rhetoric, this meme is both on topic and worthy of note. I told you they were losing money hand-over-fist on a monthly basis. They just raised $60 million from institutional investors last July, and now it's reported that they've raised another $90 million, bringing the total raised to $256 million. Patreon—the online service that allows podcasters, musicians and others to receive financial support from fans—has raised a $90 million round of funding from fans of its own, The Information has learned. The company recently closed the round at a $1.2 billion pre-money valuation, according to two people familiar with the matter. That is about double the pre-money valuation for the company before a round of funding last year, according to PitchBook, the financial data firm.  Let's see. This Series E round is enough to cover the costs of about what, another 3,215 arbitrations.... The membership services company has raised around $256 million to date. New investors include New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Wellington Management and Lone Pine, and existing investors Glade Brook Capital, Thrive Capital, DFJ Growth and Index Ventures also participated in the round. Joe Rogan took the ticket and cashed in, but the ticket always comes at a price. There is a certain pattern that is readily apparent once you see which episodes somehow didn't make it to Spotify, despite Mr. Rogan insisting that Spotify would have no control over his content.

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1461 - Owen Smith

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1458 - Chris D'Elia

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1456 - Michael Shermer

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1303 - Tommy Chong

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1296 - Joe List

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1255 - Alex Jones Returns

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1182 - Nick Kroll

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1164 - Mikhaila Peterson

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1093 - Owen Benjamin & Kurt Metzger

The Joe Rogan Experience - #1033 - Owen Benjamin

The Joe Rogan Experience - #998 - Owen Benjamin

The Joe Rogan Experience - #980 - Chris D'Elia

The Joe Rogan Experience - #979 - Sargon of Akkad

The Joe Rogan Experience - #920 - Gavin McInnes

The Joe Rogan Experience - #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo

The Joe Rogan Experience - #820 - Milo Yiannopoulos

The Joe Rogan Experience - #750 - Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn, producers of Conspiracy

The Joe Rogan Experience - #710 - Gavin McInnes

The Joe Rogan Experience - #702 - Milo Yiannopoulos

The Joe Rogan Experience - #640 - Charles C. Johnson

"Episodes with other prominent conservatives, like political commentator Ben Shapiro or Mikhaila's father Jordan, remain available on the platform."

That doesn't prove what they think it proves....

Never, ever, bet on the prize winners. Remember, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for LITERATURE without ever even WRITING A BOOK! In his paper entitled "The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change", Steve Keen, arguably the greatest living economists, critiques the prize-winning work of the 2018 winner of the Fake Nobel in Economics, Steve Nordhaus Read the whole thing if you're economically inclined, but I anticipate that even non-economists will find his concluding section below to be both informative and amusing.

When I began this research, I expected that the main cause of Nordhaus's extremely low predictions of damages from climate change would be the application of a very high discount rate (Nordhaus, 2007)11 to climate damages estimated by scientists (Hickel, 2018), and that a full critique of his work would require explaining why an equilibrium-based Neoclassical model like DICE12 was the wrong tool to analyse something as uncertain, dynamic and far-from-equilibrium as climate change (Blatt, 1979; DeCanio, 2003).13 Instead, I found that the computing adage 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' Figure 10. Kahn and Mohaddes's linear extrapolation of the temperature: GDP relationship from 1960–2014 out till 2100 (Kahn et al., 2019, p. 6).

(GIGO) applied: it does not matter how good or how bad the actual model is, when it is fed 'data' like that concocted by Nordhaus and the like-minded Neoclassical economists who followed him. The numerical estimates to which they fitted their inappropriate models are, as shown here, utterly unrelated to the phenomenon of global warming. Even an appropriate model of the relationship between climate change and GDP would return garbage predictions if it were calibrated on 'data' like this.

This raises a key question: how did such transparently inadequate work get past academic referees? Simplifying assumptions and the refereeing process: the poachers becomes the gatekeepers One reason why this research agenda was not drowned at birth was the proclivity for Neoclassical economists to make assumptions on which their conclusions depend, and then dismiss any objections to them on the grounds that they are merely 'simplifying assumptions'.

As Paul Romer observed, the standard justification for this is 'Milton Friedman's (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed authority that 'the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions' (Romer, 2016, p. 5). Those who make this defence do not seem to have noted Fried-man's footnote that 'The converse of the proposition does not of course hold: assumptions that are unrealistic (in this sense) do not guarantee a significant theory' (Friedman, 1953, p. 14).

A simplifying assumption is something which, if it is violated, makes only a small difference to your analysis. Musgrave points out that 'Galileo's assumption that air-resistance was negligible for the phenomena he investigated was a true statement about reality, and an important part of the explanation Galileo gave of those phenomena' (Musgrave, 1990, p. 380). However, the kind of assumptions that Neoclassical economists frequently make, are ones where if the assumption is false, then the theory itself is invalidated (Keen, 2011, pp. 158–174).

This is clearly the case here with the core assumptions of Nordhaus and his Neoclassical colleagues. If activities that occur indoors are, in fact, subject to climate change; if the temperature to GDP relationships across space cannot be used as proxies for the impact of global warming on GDP, then their conclusions are completely false. Climate change will be at least one order of magnitude more damaging to the economy than their numbers imply – working solely from rejecting their spurious assumption that about 90% of the economy will be unaffected by it. It could be far, far worse.

Unfortunately, referees who accept Friedman's dictum that 'a theory cannot be tested by the 'realism' of its 'assumptions'' (Friedman, 1953, p. 23) were unlikely to reject a paper because of its assumptions, especially if it otherwise made assumptions that Neoclassical economists accept.

Thus, Nordhaus's initial sorties in this area received a free pass.

After this, a weakness of the refereeing process took over. As any published academic knows, once you are published in an area, journal editors will nominate you as a referee for that area. Thus, rather than peer review providing an independent check on the veracity of research, it can allow the enforcement of a hegemony. As one of the first of the very few Neoclassical economists to work on climate change, and the first to proffer empirical estimates of the damages to the economy from climate change, this put Nordhaus in the position to both frame the debate, and to play the role of gatekeeper. One can surmise that he relished this role, given not only his attacks on Forrester and the Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, et al., 1972; Nordhaus, 1973; Nordhaus et al., 1992), but also his attack on his fellow Neoclassical economist Nicholas Stern for using a low discount rate in The Stern Review (Nordhaus, 2007; Stern, 2007).

The product has been an undue degree of conformity in this community that even Tol acknowledged:

it is quite possible that the estimates are not independent, as there are only a relatively small number of studies, based on similar data, by authors who know each other well … although the number of researchers who published marginal damage cost estimates is larger than the number of researchers who published total impact estimates, it is still a reasonably small and close-knit community who may be subject to group-think, peer pressure, and self-censoring. (Tol, 2009, p. 37, 42–43)

Indeed.

Were climate change an effectively trivial area of public policy, then the appallingly bad work done by Neoclassical economists on climate change would not matter greatly. It could be treated, like the intentional Sokal hoax (Sokal, 2008), as merely a salutary tale about the foibles of the Academy.

But the impact of climate change upon the economy, human society, and the viability of the Earth's biosphere in general, are matters of the greatest importance. That work this bad has been done, and been taken seriously, is therefore not merely an intellectual travesty like the Sokal hoax. If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly con-template (Kulp & Strauss, 2019; Lenton et al., 2019; Lynas, 2020; Moses, 2020; Raymond et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020; Yumashev et al., 2019), then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.

After minimizing and denigrating the science fiction canon that he has, perhaps more than any other author, personally degraded and defiled, John Scalzi offers a feeble defense: The dimwitted bigot brigade finally came across my piece about the Science Fiction canon from a couple of weeks ago and had a predictable spasm about it, asserting how it was evidence that (I'm paraphrasing from various sources, here) a) science fiction and fantasy was dying, b) traditional publishing (the sf/f parts of it anyway) is dying too, c) I'm responsible in some measure for a) and b), despite d) the fact that apparently I don't actually sell and/or only sell through byzantine sleight of hand by the publishing industry for reasons and also e) I suck, f) which is why I don't want people to read older works because then they would realize that, and while we're at it g) modern sf/f is infested with terrible work from people who aren't straight white dudes, h) which I, a straight white dude, am also somehow responsible for, and so in short, i) everything is my fault, and j) I am simultaneously a nobody and also history's worst monster.

It's a lot! I think it must be tiring to be a dimwitted bigot, thinking about me.

In fact it's been a pretty solid year so far for traditionally-published science fiction and fantasy. in terms of sales.

For once, I don't think McRapey is lying, I think he's just ignorant and ill-informed. In publishing terms, "a solid year" means growth of 5 to 10 percent. For example, Publisher's Weekly described general nonfiction as having had a solid year in 2019: "General nonfiction also had a solid year, with print units ahead 8.8%."

Science fiction, not so much.

Print unit sales in adult fiction fell again in 2019, though at a slower rate than in 2018, when units dropped 4.6%.... Science fiction had the largest decline among the adult fiction genres, with units down 19.7%. A 20 percent decline is not "a solid year" for the genre, it is approaching catastrophe. Now, you might suggest that he's referring to 2020, which would be an interesting trick considering the fact there are no substantive statistics reported on the various market segments yet. And while unit sales of print books in the first half of 2020 were up 2.8% over the same period in 2019, most of that increase appears to be in the children's nonfiction category since parents were having to school their children at home during the lockdown.

Anyhow, by this point it should be clear that while Scalzi is an expert at conning publishers and snowing SJWs, he's not exactly a reliable source on the business of selling books or running a business.

There is talent, and then there is what might be described as assisted talent. You don't even have to ask if this guy took the ticket. Ed Sheeran and wife Cherry Seaborn announce birth of daughter Lyra Antarctica - named after the main character in his favourite book, His Dark Materials. That weird little guy doesn't have skeletons in his close, he almost certainly has them on the grounds of his estate. Anyone dare to take the bet that he doesn't eventually announce how he will not be leaving most of his vast fortune to this little girl?