Vox forgot to knock on wood

April 3, 2024 — Biggest quake in 25 years hits Taiwan. Vox Day posts that this is clearly no more a coincidence than if a tsunami were to hit New York City.

April 5, 2024 — Biggest quake in a century hits New York City.

It’s not a tsunami, and “biggest in a century” is still small potatoes in as seismically inert an area as the Big Apple. Still, I’m calling that one hell of a coincidence.

No, the earthquake wasn’t a weapon!

I’m not exactly allergic to conspiracy theories, but this one is just silly. Vox Day has written that the recent quake in Taiwan was “A Warning to Taipei” from Beijing. Given the geopolitical context — tensions between the two One Chinas are high, as they often are — “This is no more an act of nature than . . . a tidal wave that just happened to hit Manhattan would be one.”

The thing is, Taiwan lies on a plate boundary, where quakes are a regular occurrence, and this one is not even remotely comparable to tsunami hitting New York City. It hit near Hualien on the east coast, the most sparsely populated (and least militarily important) part of the whole island, which is why the death toll was only 9 — as opposed to 2,400 when a quake of comparable magnitude struck the central region in 1999. If a 7.3 was going to hit Taiwan — as the laws of geology decree must happen from time to time — this was the least-bad place for it to hit. Still a tragedy for those affected, of course, but overall the Taiwanese feel lucky, not threatened.

I guess Vox’s logic is that this is a warning shot, that China is demonstrating its quake-causing powers in a low-casualty region first, with the implied threat that Taipei is next unless the Taiwanese fall in line? But such a threat would only work if the quake were widely understood to be a Chinese attack, which it certainly is not. If your show of force is so cleverly disguised as a natural phenomenon that no one has any reason to doubt that it is a natural phenomenon, it loses all efficacy as a show of force.

Vox’s only argument for the quake being artificial is the amazing “coincidence” of its happening at a time when cross-strait tensions are somewhat high. But cross-strait tensions are usually high. That’s not a coincidence at all.

If China really was trying to make a subtle threat, it was too subtle for its own good. No one in Taiwan perceived this as an attack, and no one will change their political behavior in response to it.

Weirdly specific sync: Meerkats and piranhas

I taught a children's English class this evening. We read this article:

The article consists of one paragraph about baboons and one about meerkats, but the emphasis is clearly on the meerkats, which are featured both in the illustration and in the "weird but true" factoid. Meerkat is a Dutch word.

After the class, two of the children, a brother and sister, were playing a card game while they waited for their parents to pick them up. I heard them saying, "Red fish! . . . Blue fish! . . . Special fish!" Since special is the modifier they usually use if they don't know how to say something properly in English, I checked to see what they were playing so I could give them the needed vocabulary. The "special fish" turned out to be none other than the namesake of this game:

Less than an hour later, I had finished work and decided to check a few blogs. Clicking on a link to a Vox Day post with the uninformative title "You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You," and vaguely expecting something medical or political, I found this instead:

This is obviously not the sort of topic Vox usually covers. His very first sentence calls meerkats "the Piranha of the Serengheti."

Immediately after this, I checked my own blog comments. In my recent "Fever dreams" post, I recount a dream in which D∞D = D&D = "Death & Death." A new comment there by Rara Avis reads:

"Dood" literally means "death" and "dead" in Dutch; I was wondering whether to tell you this before.

Another Dutch word, like meerkat, and it's linked to the double-D. Then I realized that piranha has also been associated with double-D.

Not only is it a double-D, but the numeral 3 is very close to being a lemniscate.

Piranha 3DD was released in 2012, the same year as Life of Pi, which prominently features meerkats. It's called Life of Pi because the main character is called Pi -- short for Piscene, meaning "of or pertaining to fish." Piranha, of course, is a fish name that begins with the letters pi. One also notes in passing that Green Lantern's Eskimo sidekick is called Pie.

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.

The magic word that CRIPPLES Google

Before deployment of magic word:

And after:

Sorry, sir, we're fresh out of stock -- but perhaps I could interest you in this nice Wikipedia article on Tim Burton? Did you know that he directed Walken in both Batman Returns and Sleepy Hollow?

Since Google offered the weird tip that "cake recipes" might help me find what I was looking for, I thought I might as well try that. Obviously, anyone who Googles "cake recipes" is likely to be a novice in search of a very basic recipe, and so Google serves up this:

Note that this magic word only seems to work on Google. Duckduckgo, Bing, and Yandex all yield a Christopher Walken article as the first hit -- the same one, in fact, on some site called Info-something-or-other.

Vox Day is still around.

Gogmagog has blocked him, but you can still read him at https://www.milobookclub.com/

Sixes

This morning, despite my general aversion to talking video, I somehow found myself watching Jonathan Pageau expound on the meaning of 666.

Instead of the usual gematria/isopsephy approach of finding words and names that add up to 666, Pageau (following the lead of St. Irenaeus and others) focuses on the meaning of 6 itself and other occurrences of it in the Bible. He mentions the six days of creation, the supposed 6,000-year history of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar's golden image that was 60 cubits high and six cubits wide, and the fact that Noah was 600 years old when the Flood occurred.

Pageau doesn't use the term "triangular number," but he does mention that 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, and that the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 6² is 666. I would add that 6 is the most triangular number there is: 6 is triangular, 6² is triangular, 66 is triangular, and 666 is triangular.

(Pageau also discusses how and why 666 symbolizes the all-encompassing System from which no one is allowed to opt out, and is well worth watching for those insights, but they are not directly relevant to the synchronicities noted in this post.)

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Just after watching that, I checked some blogs and read a recent post by Vox Day saying that "Thomas Wictor is a goofball" for accepting the official belief that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Vox writes:

As it happens, the iconic six million figure long predates the existence of the German National Socialist Workers Party, and even predates the existence of Germany, Charlemagne, and the Holy Roman Empire, as it goes back to at least 136 AD. Forget Nazis and death camps, we are reliably informed that six million Jews faced starvation in 1931 after another six million Jews died in the Bar-Cochiba Revolt during the Third Jewish-Roman War.

A commenter asks:

What's the significance of six million to them? Does it have occult symbolism or something?

Another commenter suggests:

I think the 6 million choice for a number is based on some kind of kabbalistic principle. There is a consistent belief that there were 600,000 Jewish souls at Mt. Sinai, based on the number of letters believed to make up the Torah.

Looking this up, I find that there are really only 304,805 letters in the Torah, but that there are assumed to be additional "invisible letters" which bring the total up to the requisite 600,000. The article also says:

There's yet more significance to the idea of inverse letters. The 600,000 letters correspond to the 600,000 souls of Israel. Although there are many more than 600,000 Jews, there are 600,000 general souls which divide into the individual sparks that become each of our souls.

So obviously, the significance of 6 (times various powers of 10) comes first, and actual figures -- like the numbers of Jewish souls, Torah letters, and Holocaust victims -- are arbitrarily enlarged or reduced to fit that Procrustean bed.

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After writing most of the above, but before publishing it, I met with one of my students, a businessman. He subscribes to a magazine for student of English which has articles on a variety of subjects, with accompanying notes on potentially unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar. We went through two of the articles he had read recently -- one about stop-motion animation and one about Oedipus -- so I could explain anything he still didn't understand.

For each article, a handful of vocabulary words are chosen for emphasis, and at the end of the article these are listed, each with a definition and an example sentence.

At the end of the first article, this sentence was used to exemplify the use of the word represent:

This eight-meter statue represents the country's first president.

Recall that Pageau had discussed the measurements of the golden statue made by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3:1): six cubits wide and 60 cubits high. The sentence in the magazine didn't use the number six, but the strange focus on the height of the statue still seemed a significant synchronicity. I mean, if you were asked to use the word represent in a sentence, would you naturally come up with a sentence about how tall a specific statue is?

The second article mentioned how the Sphinx drowned herself after her riddle had been solved, so at the end there was an example sentence for drown.

Officials said that six people drowned in the flood.

Now that's a more impressive sync! Six is given as the "official" number of people who died, as in the Holocaust. And they died in "the flood"; recall that Pageau had mentioned that the Flood occurred when Noah was 600 years old.

I don't think that's what "one another" means

From the Church of Latter-day Definitely Not Mormons: First Presidency and NAACP Leaders Announce a Shared Vision to "Learn from and Serve One Another"

Now, as a certified expert on English grammar -- I think I'll start calling it the grammar -- I know all about reciprocal pronoun constructions such as "one another" and can attest that the "shared vision" referred to in the headline should involve the LDS First Presidency learning from and serving the NAACP leaders and the NAACP leaders learning from and serving the LDS First Presidency. Reading the article, let's see how this will work out in detail.

The Church of Not Mormon Anymore will:

• give $3 million of tithing money (donated by church members worldwide, about 98.5% of whom are not black Americans) to a college scholarship fund exclusively for "young black students in the United States"
• provide $250,000 (also from tithing) to pay for black American students to study abroad in Ghana and "learn more about their heritage"
• donate an additional $6 million of tithing funds to the NAACP to "bring relief to suffering souls in underprivileged [meaning black] areas of the United States"

In exchange for the CJCLDS's spending nearly $10 million on the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association for the same will present the Formerly Mormon Hierarchy with this:

(subject to revocation without notice)

Quite the bargain, don't you think?

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Note added: For some reason, this post, with its focus on "race," made me think of a book I read as a very young child. It was about a dragon with a (trigger warning!) speech impediment, who would try to scare off robbers by shouting, "Wace! Wun! Wobbers be done! The tewwible dwagon is here!" It even occurred to me that I should start tagging posts about "anti" racist idiocy with "Wace! Wun! Wobbers be done!"

Then, in a truly bizarre synchronicity, I checked Vox Day's blog and found that the latest post was called "Hunting wacists" -- obviously an allusion to Elmer Fudd, but then he took the "wacist" thing and wan with it.

The problem, of course, is wacism. If only white Americans would stop being so wacist, black men would not have to hunt them and shoot them.

So stop being wacist. Or else.

Oh, by the way, we are reliably informed by Ivy League academics that all whites are inherently wacist. So, you know, good luck with all that not-wacisting. 

PS: avoiding people who are hunting you is also wacist. Nice try.

 Well, now that the sync fairies have spoken I can't very well not use that tag.

No, there weren't more excess deaths in 2017 than in 2020.

Perhaps you've seen Samuel H. Preston and Yana C. Vierboom's paper, "Excess mortality in the United States in the 21st century," published this April in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

It was linked on the Junior Ganymede with the comment, "2020 is the deadliest year on record since . . . 2017." Vox Day, referencing the same paper, said, "Got that? Fewer people died in 2020 than in 2017." I more or less trust the JG and VD, but I clicked through to the original paper and read the abstract, which seemed to confirm their summaries:

In 2017, excess deaths and years of life lost in the United States represent a larger annual loss of life than that associated with the [birdemic] in 2020.

There's no excuse for my letting this slip past my BS detector -- I knew it completely contradicted the statistics W. M. Briggs faithfully reports every week -- or for failing to read the whole paper, which turns out to be really short. I'm ashamed to say I just saw it as ammo I could use with friends and family members who trust The Science and accepted it without asking too many questions. In fact, it turns out that the abstract is misleading, and the paper is garbage, publish-or-perish busywork that contributes nothing to human knowledge.

"Excess deaths in the United States" means, in this paper, not deaths in excess of what would be expected in a "normal" year in the United States, but rather the degree to which death rates in the U.S. in a given year exceed those of five selected European countries in the same year. The paper's meaningless and useless "finding" is that the difference between American and European death rates in 2017 (with American rates being higher) was larger than the difference between American and European death rates in 2020.

This has nothing to do with whether more people died in 2017 or in 2020, or with how serious the birdemic was. In fact, it has nothing to do with anything, and it's not entirely clear why anyone thought it worth publishing.

Thanks to my father for reading the whole thing and informing me that it doesn't actually say what it says on the tin.

Build up the repertoire

Today I checked Vox Day's blog and skimmed some of his recent posts. One of them had the title "Time to build up the repertoire."

Immediately after that, I decided to look through the unpublished drafts for this blog and clean out the ones that weren't going anywhere. One draft I found, from August 24, 2020, was a note about a dream I had had back then.

I was wandering the streets of what I took to be New York City, and everywhere I went, I kept running into Weird Al Yankovic strolling down the sidewalk strumming a guitar and singing. He seemed to be cycling through the same two or three songs, so I kept hearing them again and again. (I have no real sense of what songs they were; I don't really know Yankovic's work.) Finally, I went up to him and said, "Hey, if you're going to sing on the street, maybe you need a bigger repertoire. People will get tired of hearing the same songs." He accepted this helpful advice graciously.

Google is still a joke

First page of search results for vox day (no quotation marks):

DuckDuckGo:

• Vox Popoli (1st result)
• 8 other results about blogger Vox Day (Theodore Beale)
• 1 result about an unrelated company called Vox Day

Yandex:

• Vox Popoli (1st result)
• 8 other results about blogger Vox Day (Theodore Beale)
• 1 result about an unrelated company called Vox Day

Bing:

• Vox Popoli (1st result)
• 8 other results about blogger Vox Day (Theodore Beale)
• 1 result about an unrelated company called Vox Day

Seeing a pattern here? And now for the punchline . . .

Google:

• 7 results about blogger Vox Day (Theodore Beale)
• 2 result about an unrelated company called Vox Day
• Vox Popoli (9th result)
• 1 result for a Vox Media article that happens to include the word day

They've somehow managed to become the worst major company in the field with which their name has become synonymous! I'm going to have to break the habit of using Google as a verb -- and as a search engine, of course!

And when we touched the powder off . . .

I've already identified Lin Wood as the "alligator" in "The Battle of New Orleans" (allegator = maker of allegations) -- and, like clockwork, they've filled his head with Qanon-balls and powdered his behind. He's just let loose with a rash of highly specific allegations -- including that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself because he is still alive -- so off the wall that people are asking if he's lost his mind. Vox Day's comment:

Given that some of the objects of his criticism have publicly threatened defamation lawsuits, either Lin Woods is off his rocker or he is in possession of hard evidence. 

By the way, I'm getting a pretty strong Hickory vibe from this guy, who even bears a certain physical resemblance to Andy Jackson, and whose name is basically Wood Wood Wood. (Lucian Lincoln "Lin" Wood. Lucian, from a Latin root that means "grove" as well as "light"; Lincoln as in Lincoln Logs; even Lin means "wood" in Chinese.)

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Also: I'm not sure why I didn't think of this before, after posting so much about Old Hickory and also citing Aleister Crowley on the Kabbalistic interpretation of nursery rhymes.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

I think dickery means something along the lines of "shenanigans," or maybe just being a dick. In this case, though, I think the relevant meaning comes from the old use of dick to mean "detective." Dickery means detective work, collecting evidence.

Dock: "in the dock" means "on trial."

The mouse ran up the clock.

To "run up the clock" means to drag things out, treading water until the deadline arrives. Both sides are doing this, so I'm not sure who or what the "mouse" is.

The clock struck one,

The traditional deadline is 12:00 midnight, so the clock striking one means things not being resolved until after the usual date.

The mouse ran down,

Vehicular assault? Running out of steam? Running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico? It all depends on the identity of the "mouse."

Hickory, dickory, dock.

Synchronicity: A parallel world with two moons in a book named after a year

Regular readers will know that I just recently read Whitley Strieber's 2007 novel 2012: The War for Souls. While it has a certain Strieberian charm that kept me reading to the end, it is basically a very poorly written book, and I can't recommend it. The story has to do with three versions of earth that exist in parallel universes. One of these is the earth we know. Another is a world in which the dinosaurs never went extinct but rather evolved into a race of (mostly) evil humanoid reptiles. The third is very close to our world but has several differences; they have McDonald's, for example, but it has "emerald arches" rather than golden ones, that sort of thing. (They also had no World Wars and no Communism -- but inexplicably somehow still had a Manhattan Project and have the hydrogen bomb! As I said, it's poorly written.) The most obvious difference, though, is that this parallel earth has two moons -- and "two-moon earth" and "one-moon earth" are used throughout the novel to refer to these two similar worlds.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, it just so happens that NASA has recently discovered a tiny asteroid that has been orbiting the earth for a few years, and the press is hyping it a "second moon" despite its diminutive size (just a few meters wide). I discovered this a few days after finishing 2012 when Vox Day linked to a news story about it, titling his post (qv) "We're living in 1Q84."

I knew that 1Q84 was a novel by Haruki Murakami, and that the title is equivalent to 1984 (the Japanese word for "nine" sounds like the English name of the letter Q) but had not read it and knew nothing else about it. (I read A Wild Sheep Chase years ago and enjoyed it, but not enough to try anything else by the author.) A bit of Googling revealed that, just like Strieber's 2012, it is about a parallel earth that has two moons.

Reading the Vox Day post so shortly after finishing 2012 was a coincidence, but it's also a coincidence that two novels were written within a few years of each other -- by very different authors in different countries -- but each with a year as the title, and each featuring a parallel two-moon earth. Strieber's novel was published in 2007; Murakami's in 2009 and 2010 in Japanese, with the English version following in 2011. Therefore, any direct influence would have to have been from Strieber to Murakami rather than vice versa, which seems highly unlikely.

It occurs to me that the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact -- released in 1984, just as the final volume of Murakami's 1Q84 was released in 2010 -- also has a plot that revolves around two moons, in this case two of the moons of Jupiter, not those of a parallel earth. Coincidence, or deliberate homage?