Tag Archives: Bullshit

Informed Naked Ape Protocol

Posted on by
1

Many think we are living in a golden age of bullshit. That public discourse has never been gaudier or more demeaning. That respect for truth and decency has reached all-time lows. The mental pygmies that hold these opinions don’t read or think for themselves. Deceiving ourselves and others is the one thing our species excels at. Lies are the bedrock of art, economics, politics, and religion. Only two tiny slivers of human thought have ever breached the bullshit barrier and approached something that might be credibly labeled truth: hard science, and harder mathematics.

If you think I am going to praise brave men, (and bitches), of science for lighting a candle in the perpetual darkness, (Carl Sagan already wrote an entire fawning book on this self-aggrandizing theme), think again. Scientists are just as flawed and full of crap as the rest of us. Science occasionally succeeds because it has evolved protocols that correct for human bullshit. A good protocol protects us against our worst enemy – ourselves.

My Informed Naked Ape Protocol, or iNap for short, consists of eleven1 pithy maxims that force a hard ass skeptical view of things. I will manifest my maxims here and elaborate on each one in following posts.

Informed Naked Ape Protocol

  1. Enough people are scum.
  2. Trust is for imbeciles.
  3. “Belief” is a bullshit word.
  4. Assume corruption.
  5. Analyze the data, not the drivel.
  6. Demand full analytic disclosure.
  7. Practice relentless verification.
  8. Centralized systems are always corrupted.
  9. If you don’t control it you cannot trust it.
  10. Only scientific and mathematical arguments are admissible.
  11. Correct errors.
  1. Why eleven? The last time somebody tried to get the inhabitants of planet moron to follow ten simple rules it didn’t work out.↩

Corporate Social Media Policies

Posted on by

You probably work for a company that has a corporate social media policy (CSMP). I’m betting that your CSMP’s preamble starts with words like, “we would never restrict the free speech rights of employees but blah, blah, blah, … It’s what follows the “but” that matters. For example my employer does not want anything I write to:

  1. Adversely reflect on the “brand.”
  2. Divulge proprietary or trade secrets.
  3. Reflect poorly on company officers and employees.
  4. Move our stock price.

This is all just common sense as far as I’m concerned and it irritates me that we now have to sit through more mandatory inane HR training sessions belaboring the obvious. Corporate social media policies join sexual harassment, diversity training and nondisclosure agreements in the ever-expanding pantheon of to be ignored corporate bullshit. In my case my company is safe. I purge my brain of work thoughts the second I leave the company’s parking lot. I refuse to carry company cell-phones and I will fight like a cornered badger to keep work at work. There is a difference between being a professional and being a serf.

Companies prefer managing serfs. The ideal employee is the professional serf. You might think professional serfs are as common as unicorns but you’re wrong. The young often go through a professional serf stage. If you’re a graduate student you’re probably a professional serf. If you’re a top ranked young programmer working seventy hour weeks on some doomed pile of crap-ware you’re a professional serf. If you’re an articling lawyer you’re a professional serf. If you’re a medical intern you’re a professional serf. Many employers want to meet and exploit you. They know that you will burnout or smarten up but HR’s persistent cream dream is to find some naive young genius willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their good.

I went through a professional serf stage but my bad attitude couldn’t sustain it. Now I think like a corporation; I put a price on everything! If you want me to give a crap about your servers at 2am on Saturday that will be another $15,000 per year and an extra week of vacation time. I’ve found that when you’re completely upfront about these issues you either don’t get the gig, usually a blessing in disguise, or people see they’re dealing with a real professional and want you even more. Corporations have enough simpering eunuchs on the payroll, having a few ballsy shitheads around gives the joint class.

By now you’re probably wondering if I’ve violated my employer’s corporate social media policy. Have I damaged their brand? Have I impugned our CEO? Have I goosed our stock price? Have I exposed proprietary secrets? No, no, no and no! Will I moderate my opinions and think about the company when blogging? No!

Brett Kimblerlin Free Speech Hating Criminal SOS

Posted on by

Today I’m joining a free speech blogburst in support of bloggers harassed and threatened by Brett Kimberlin (SOS) and his butt monkeys.  Brett has a problem with people pointing out his bomb detonating criminal terrorist past, but unlike your typical effeminate impotent lefty whiner, Brett isn’t going to take any truth-telling lying down. No Brett is going to wage scorched earth lawfare and if that isn’t good enough get some of his unhinged goons to threaten violence.  Yes, Brett practices the restrained dispassionate discourse advocated by The One.  Unfortunately Brett has pissed off some real men and women and those of us with gnarly gonads and fertile ovaries will not be intimidated by our intellectual, moral and cosmetic inferiors. So sue me if you want Brett. Threaten me if you have the balls but before you get in my face keep in mind that Missouri is a concealed carry state.

Brett Kimberlin mug shot

Brett Kimberlin speedway bomber mug shot

1421: The Crank History of Gavin Menzies

Posted on by

Crank history is big business and it’s getting bigger. For reasons that infuriate skeptics there is a never-ending parade of pseudo-historians spouting rubbish that is eagerly devoured by a credulous pig ignorant public. Gavin Menzies’ ludicrous tome, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, (also titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World), is the finest example of delusional sophistry I’ve encountered since Graham Hancock’s insane Finger Prints of the Gods.

About  the only thing you can say for Gavin’s fantasy is that, (unlike Hancock’s Finger Prints — the “science” behind the movie 2012), 1421 is remotely plausible. It’s to bad that remotely plausible does not make your case! Skeptics are hard-asses we demand rigorous and repeatedly verified evidence before deeming suppositions possibly not crap!  By this standard Gavin falls way short. I’m not going to catalog Gavin’s many errors, omissions and deceptions. That task has already been done by an army of critics. You can look here and here and here and here. In particular Bill Hartz’s exhaustive demolition is a bracing tonic for Gavin’s numbing elixir.

To get the gist of Gavin’s arguments let’s look at one of his claims. On page 241, (paperback edition), Gavin first mentions the Sacramento Junk. The Sacramento Junk is allegedly the remains of a large wooden ship entombed under a sand bank in the Sacramento river of California. Ok, so far so good! We have a wooden wreck in a river. The Chinese junks Gavin imagined sailing around the world had unique characteristics that would easily distinguish them from plain old Pacific west coast wrecks. For example:

  1. They had 15th century teak hulls.
  2. Metal bins bolted hull compartments together.
  3. They used silk sails.
  4. They often carried porcelain, seeds and trade goods.

If the Sacramento Junk is the remains of a 15th century junk it looks like identifying it would be an archaeological no-brainer! All we have to do is sample the site, collect some 15th century teak wood for carbon dating, and bingo the case for the Chinese reaching the west coast of the America’s before Columbus is looking promising.  Gavin describes drilling into the sand bank, extracting some wood and carbon dating it to 1410.  Isn’t science wonderful?

Here are a few questions.

  • Where the hell is the Sacramento Junk?

Your impressive end-notes mention collecting samples in 2002 and 2003. I believe GPS was up and running. Could we have exact coordinates please?

  • Was the wood teak?

If you’re looking for teak ships you might want to consult a wood expert. Teak, even old rotting teak, is easily identified. Look into it.

  • How many samples were carbon dated?
  • Where the hell are the lab reports, sample photographs  and other documents?
  • Did you notify the historic relic Nazi’s of your amazing Chinese wreck?

You almost need a permit to weed your own damn garden in California for fear of disturbing native artifacts yet somehow you pillaged an ultra-historic wreck without the save our culture weenies whining —  yeah I once lived in California. With so many simple facts omitted you wonder if the Sacramento Junk is a figment of Gavin’s lurid imagination.

Gavin repeats this pattern of building a case for the Chinese Stopped Here over and over again and, without exception, always omits basic information that would lend credence to his claims. You need to set your bullshit detector on maximum when sailing with Gavin!

Debt Dolts Diddle and Drone!

Posted on by

Government Fiscal Policy

Well well it turns out that when John Boehner isn’t crying like a little girl he can deliver a speech. Tonight he smoked Obama like a fine cigar. I tried to flip around Obama’s debt limit rant but ended up watching like a gawker at a hospital fire.

Any dolt with a fifth graders grasp of arithmetic can see the US is completely and irrevocably broke! We’re in such a deep dark debt hole that we haven’t seen sunlight for eons. Financial rickets is setting in; the soft bones of the republic will soon need Viagra.

But don’t worry our elected pets have a plan! They’re going to borrow and print more money so we can wire up our deep dark dept hole with overpriced union-made lamps connected to a green, made in China, energy source. If the government’s math is right the lights should stay on long enough so we can all find our assholes and shove our heads up them!

I did not have sex with that Oil Spill!

Posted on by

bp-oil-shoresI would like to thank BP for accidently creating a teachable moment for our political class.  Prior to the gulf cluster-fuck the most ethical congress in history did not know that fluid dynamics is one of the hardest of the hard sciences.  But, after two months of heroic attempts to contain the spill with blame games, bribes, threats, legislative initiatives and golf it’s finally dawning on the powerful minds that rule us that fluids cannot be bought-off, community-organized, press-marginalized or change-the-channel ignored.  Reality is such an unfair bitch.

Last night, sensing a disturbance in the zeitgeist, Obama subjected our nation to a rousing I did not have sex with that oil spill speech.  The One’s words soared but we, the little unworthy peons, were as unmoved as oil soaked pelicans.  Even our Obamabot leg tinglers failed to detect executive command.

I wish I could say I am disappointed but I wrote this government off a longtime ago.  The stark fiscal, technical and rhetorical incompetence they display every day is no more surprising than sunshine.  The oil spill is an infuriating accidental disaster but it’s not the biggest spill confronting us.  That would be our insane, reckless and entirely man caused deficit spending.

Let’s do some arithmetic.  Let’s assume the unhinged moonbats turned reservoir engineers have pulled the correct gulf spill rate of 100,000 barrels/day out of their asses.  Let’s also assume an oil price of $80 dollars/barrel. When you multiply everything together you find that

8000000 =  1e5 * 80

eight millions dollars of oil is spilling into the gulf every day.  Sounds bad.  Let’s compare that to our government’s fiscal spill.  The deficit for this fiscal year is expected to approach 1.3 trillion dollars.   This works out to

3.56164384e9 = 1.3e12 % 365

roughly 3.6 billion dollars/day or 445 times the gulf spill rate!  If I could plug only one damn hole I know which one I’d choose!

Everybody Abandon Facebook Day

Posted on by

Yesterday was the first ever Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.   My favorite Everybody Draw Mohammed cartoon is shown below.

Da Glory-ass Koran

Da Glory-ass Koran

For the troglodytes among us Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was a sarcastic reaction to years of bullying, death threats and fatwas issued against cartoonists for the horrible crime of drawing caricatures of Mohammed.  The point of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was to drive home the simple fact that when it comes to free speech there are no sacred cows or prophets!  Nothing is beyond offensive satire.

For me free speech is an absolute inalienable right that overrides nonsense like religious belief.  If you attempt to regulate my speech I will resist.  The harder you push the more I will push back.  If you curtail or regulate my speech I will scream louder. If you pass laws restricting discourse I will break them. If you suppress my voice I will stop debating and start shooting.  And, if you think I am bluffing go ahead and call me on it.

Given the depth of this conviction I was sorely disappointed to see that Facebook dropped The Everybody Draw Mohammed Day page.  The cowardly weasels weren’t even responding to official complaints.  They just decided to self-censor themselves and a hundred thousand Facebook users as well.  Of course they had their reasons but let’s cut the crap.  They have shown us that when cards are in play they have no core beliefs beyond pimping user data to third parties for cash.

I cannot endorse such behavior so I deleted my Facebook account.  This was not an empty gesture for me.  As a divorced father living in another country I enjoyed seeing Facebook posts from my kids on a regular basis but sometimes we have to give up things we like when they clash with principles.

So I am inviting all that sincerely uphold free speech to join with me on June 5, 2010, (the day Facebook allegedly deletes my account), to celebrate Everybody Abandon Facebook Day by deleting your own Facebook account.