All this UFO stuff is fake, by the way

I think most people who know me know that I accept the reality of close-encounter phenomena, so it is necessary to make my position clear: The current UFO hooha that's all over the news is 100% guaranteed fake and gay. They're testing the waters, and depending on how willing people are to entertain it, it's likely to become the next "you must be this stupid to ride" litmus test.

Nine months ago, I wrote "The time for UFO disclosure is now."

Why now? Because the government, the military, and the press have finally achieved zero credibility. They can "disclose" whatever they like, and people won't panic because they'll still feel deep down that it's all got to be BS. Boys who cry wolf may speak freely.

Not that people won't "believe" the disclosures, of course. Watch for a time when belief in UFOs and little green men is mandatory, and those who peddle laughable conspiracy theories about lenticular clouds and weather balloons will be tarred as "ET deniers" or whatever the term ends up being. ("Xenophobes" is already taken, I'm afraid.)

I'm not sure yet if they're going to go all in with this or not -- it all depends on how the public reacts -- but I think the chance is pretty high. The "AI" thing was a big hit, so this is probably the next logical step.

Racism is a fake sin

I'm sure most of my readers already know this, but it seems necessary to make an explicit statement.

Noticing racial differences and the actions of racial interest groups is smart. Acting in accordance with that information -- "discrimination" -- is rational and good. Stereotypes and generalizations are useful, necessary, and unavoidable. Preferring the company of one's own people is natural. Love and loyalty for one's own people is praiseworthy. Agree? Congratulations, you're a racist! Welcome to the club.

There is a limited (but rapidly growing!) market for evil as such. Therefore, mass evil movements will typically embrace, or pretend to embrace, something good and use it to justify the evil. It is the evil that is to be condemned, not the good principle that is used as an excuse. Those who condemn colonialism, slavery, and genocide because they are "racist" are at the same intellectual level as the Nu-Atheist neckbeard smugly condemning "religion" as the cause of everything from witch-hunts to Muslim terrorism. As well might one criticize the hippies by inveighing against peace and love, or the Communists by condemning compassion for the poor. As well might anti-war protesters chant, "Stop the patriotism!"

Cruelty is bad. Injustice is bad. Exploitation is bad. Resentment is bad. Dishonesty and bad faith are bad. All of these things can and should be condemned on their own terms, without treating them as instances of "racism" or any of the other fake sins of modernity.

BREAKING: Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't exist, and Jim Carrey is now Paul Giamatti

Just when you thought Google couldn't get any faker or gayer . . .

None of this has been photoshopped. I have no idea what's going on, how long it's been like this, or how long it will continue.

Challenge: Find any search string that returns more than 500 Google results

Remember Jorn Barger's "Elvis Index" from the golden age of the Internet? The idea was to use the Altavista search engine to quantify the relative poularity of various things by taking the number of search results for any given topic and comparing it to the number of results for the string elvis.

Suppose we tried the same thing with Google now. If I put in elvis, Google tells me there are about 348 million results, so that number is 1 elvis. For world cup, there are supposedly 2.84 billion results, so that's 8.16 elvises. Self-cleaning terrarium yields 1.85 million results, so that's about 5.32 millielvises. That seems plausible enough. Everyone knows that the World Cup is considerably bigger than Elvis, and that Elvis is orders of magnitude more popular than self-cleaning terraria.

But suppose we look at the real number of Google results. After searching for elvis and being told that there are 384 million results, we patiently click through to the very last page of those results -- which, rather surprisingly, turns out to be the 19th page!

So we click to "repeat the search with the omitted results included" -- we want every result -- and once again click through to the last page. This time, we find that there are 40 pages, and a whopping 400 results.

And that's it! You've reached the end of the Internet, as far as Google is concerned. I mean they did say about 348 million, not precisely that number. So the real value of one elvis is 400.

I've tried this with a wide variety of search strings, and the most results I've ever been able to get (Jesus Christ and basketball are tied for the number-one place, closely followed by rancho cucamonga and fruit salad) is 434, or 1.085 elvises.

Nor have I been able to find any strings (other than literal gibberish) that return less than half an elvis. The not-very-popular dinosaur styracosaurus returns 94 centielvises, just edging out covid-19. Even vendergood, the name of an extremely obscure language invented by child prodigy William James Sidis at the age of eight, returns 66 centielvises.

Google search is a scam. It says it has millions of hits for whatever you're searching for, but it doesn't. It doesn't even have 500, for anything. If it weren't free, I think this would literally be fraud.

Bing is the same. If you search for elvis, it's impossible to click beyond the 14th page, so only 134 results are visible. DuckDuckGo doesn't provide numbers, but you can only click "more results" 10 times before you reach the end of its elvis offerings. Yandex offers 25 pages of results. No search engine actually delivers the millions of results they advertise.

Sam Harris can be an idiot sometimes, but there are limits!

Vox Day posted this quote from Sam Harris the other day without providing a link.

Whether or not there is any truth to [peck] harm is irrelevant. There are numerous studies that prove the power of psychosomatic thinking. This is why we must censor anti[peck] information at all costs: because people who "believe" they've taken poison will suffer ill-effects as if they actually took poison.

Sam Hariss, 7 September 2022

This immediately set off my BS detector. Say what you will about Sam Harris, he is an educated, literate person, and there is approximately zero chance that he would hyphenate ill-effects or use quotation marks for emphasis. Also, people who support censoring information never say they want to censor information in those words; some euphemism would be used for censor, and the object of the censorship would be misinformation, disinformation, or at the very least controversial claims. Finally, the argument itself -- trivially easy to discredit by replacing peck with smoking -- is just a bit too retarded even for a Nu-Atheist.

And, surprise, surprise, Googling the supposed quote turns up pretty much nothing. I haven't been able to find Vox's source. A September 12 post on /sci/ has the same quote but credits it only to "Sam Harris, September 2022" without mentioning the exact date, so Vox must have gotten that detail from somewhere else.

This September 12 Reddit thread asks "Did Sam [Harris] actually tweet this?" and receives the reply that he did not, but the original post has been deleted, so I can't see the exact content of the alleged tweet. Checking Harris's Twitter, I find that he tweeted nothing at all between September 5 and September 12.

I did find this supposed Twitter screencap on iFunny. It has the September 7 date, but it can't be Vox's source because the quote itself is slightly different -- and slightly more believable, since it lacks two of the red flags I noted ("believe" and ill-effects).

This is sus on other grounds -- what self-respecting anti-Semite doesn't know and use the correct plural of goy? -- but is it still possible that Harris really tweeted this and later deleted it?

No. Because it's 310 characters. Twitter's limit is 280. Either someone went to the trouble of making a fake Twitter screenshot out of a real Sam Harris quote -- there's no telling what "goys" will do! -- or Vox has been had.