Author: VD

Bad Moonves falling

Ronan Farrow releases his expose on CBS CEO and alleged sex predator (((Les Moonves)))

For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection….

Six women who had professional dealings with him told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result. “What happened to me was a sexual assault, and then I was fired for not participating,” the actress and writer Illeana Douglas told me. All the women said they still feared that speaking out would lead to retaliation from Moonves, who is known in the industry for his ability to make or break careers. “He has gotten away with it for decades,” the writer Janet Jones, who alleges that she had to shove Moonves off her after he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting, told me. “And it’s just not O.K.”

Thirty current and former employees of CBS told me that such behavior extended from Moonves to important parts of the corporation, including CBS News and “60 Minutes,” one of the network’s most esteemed programs. During Moonves’s tenure, men at CBS News who were accused of sexual misconduct were promoted, even as the company paid settlements to women with complaints. It isn’t clear whether Moonves himself knew of the allegations, but he has a reputation for being closely involved in management decisions across the network. Some of the allegations, such as those against the former anchor Charlie Rose, as reported by the Washington Post, have already become public. Other claims are being reported here for the first time. Nineteen current and former employees told me that Jeff Fager, the former chairman of CBS News and the current executive producer of “60 Minutes,” allowed harassment in the division. “It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” one veteran producer told me. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”

It’s time for CBS to clean house, starting with the chairman and CEO.

Insight into the Hollywood cesspool

A guy who works in the industry sheds a little light on the corruption of the Hollywood cabal in the chans:

The A list community is broken down like this:

  • Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} are abusers (and that ranges from pedophile/trafficker /sacrificer down to having a casting couch).
  • Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} are genuine victims (there are literal slaves who believe they are living the high life, down to people who are raped and pressured into silence).
  • Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} willingly trade sexual favors for opportunities (ranges from begrudgingly, but they know how the system works to being a little cabal darling who loves or even gets off to whoring around).

The remaining 10{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} who are not applicable to the above is made up of:

  • People who are self-made and chose never to associate with the cabal. We know them from their own efforts, and they happened to get lucky or strike gold.
  • People who are insanely popular and make enough money for THEM that they have the clout to refuse to participate. They are usually blackmailed by credible threats of violence or ruining their careers into being quiet. Perhaps you could consider these people complicit.
  • People who are extremely diligent in not allowing themselves to be courted by THEM. This means either not going to or leaving early from Hollywood events and parties, and treating every time another person tests their waters like a joke or over reacting to the small stuff.
  • People THEY simply don’t want. Their standards may seem low, but there are hosts of people that the public likes and that came them money, but for one reason or another THEY don’t want them in the group. They’ll allow these people to remain on the outskirts of the group but will never even attempt to invite them to the inner circles.

This board has become known, and some people keep eyes on it. Some people get briefings on it. They are nervous that people are dedicated enough to dig, draw connections, lay them out plainly, then organize/coordinate to put them in front of a wide audience. These kinds of these used to be relegated to conspiracy boards and easily dispelled by mocking.

Current climate knows to fear drawing the attention of the masses. They also know once the hoard has their eye on you, everything they do is closely monitored, which is incredibly claustrophobic for people who thrive on symbolism and covert communication out in the open.

Immense push back on James Gunn’s firing as witch hunt in specific is an effort to shame the masses out of shaming people out of jobs and not let this set precedent.

Many still think and expect they’ll be able to sacrifice a few of the guilty publicly to preserve the rest. Many believe there will be a few more Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys, but they’ll be okay. Some are freezing everything until this blows over. Some see the writing on the wall and oppose publicly to try and stop.

I’m not even remotely surprised to hear that the pushback on the Gunn firing is coming straight out of the Hellmouth. It had the stink of coordination to it. This is confirmation that we should be highly suspicious of the mockers, condemn the defenders and enablers, and press on with even more investigations into uncovering the truth, whatever it may be. The more pressure that they feel, the more some will feel the need to come clean while others desperately try to cover things up. And if history is a reliable guide, it is through the attempted coverups that the whole thing will come crashing down.

Weaponized autists may not be the heroes that we wanted, but they are the heroes that we need.

Hollywood values at CBS

Ronan Farrow is exposing CBS Chairman and CEO (((Leslie Moonves))) as another (((Weinstein))):

The CBS CEO, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, is accused of unwanted kissing and touching in a New Yorker article set to be published Friday. The New Yorker is poised to publish an article by Ronan Farrow that includes allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of embattled CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

A spokesperson for The New Yorker says, “We don’t comment on pieces we haven’t published.” Sources with knowledge of the article say it delves into the broader culture at CBS and will publish later today on the magazine’s website.

CBS said in a statement that it is investigating the claims made against Moonves. “All allegations of personal misconduct are to be taken seriously,” the network stated. “The Independent Directors of CBS have committed to investigating claims that violate the Company’s clear policies in that regard. Upon the conclusion of that investigation, which involves recently reported allegations that go back several decades, the Board will promptly review the findings and take appropriate action.”

The allegations are said in part to involve instances of unwanted kissing and touching that occurred more than 20 years ago, as well as numerous claims that occurred more recently.

He’s not the first. He won’t be the last. These losers literally cannot control themselves around attractive women. It’s long past time to flush them all out of the entertainment system and the corpocracy.

Outsourcing unemployment

I’ll bet they’re celebrating landing this contract:

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, and the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS) are celebrating the launch of a new Unemployment Insurance system this week – WYUI – for the State of Wyoming. The WYUI solution is a fully modernized Unemployment Insurance system that will improve the way claimants interact with the state with a more user-friendly interface and expanded self-service capabilities.

TCS’ WYUI solution is a robust, scalable and repeatable platform with the ability to integrate and control multiple functional requirements, including online claims processing, payments, adjudication, and appeals. The WYUI implementation is also one of the first in the United States to be developed, tested and implemented in Microsoft Azure in such a short time frame, and within budget. Hosting the new system on Azure makes it more scalable than the previous system, and as the data housed in the system continues to grow, the system itself can be expanded.

TCS has already enabled several U.S. states to modernize their systems to support Unemployment Insurance programs, including Mississippi and Maine, as part of the ReEmployUSA Consortium. By partnering with Wyoming’s DWS, TCS has replaced a 34-year-old benefits and appeal legacy system with a modernized system, within a span of less than 20 months.

About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last fifty years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of IT, Business & Technology Services, and engineering. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India’s largest multinational business group, TCS has more than 400,000 of the world’s best-trained consultants in 46 countries.

What a truly virtuous cycle! Put American workers out of work, then get paid to process the transfer payments between the state government and the unemployed workers. Imagine how much money can be transferred to Indiasaved by replacing the entire Social Security Administration with Tata Consultancy Services!

No place for Sarah Silverman

CNN takes note of the Silverman controversy:

A tweet Sarah Silverman sent nine years ago, which she says was a joke, has some labeling her a pedophile.

In July 2009, the comedic actress tweeted, “Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I’m gonna need a quick answer on this.”

On Wednesday, the conservative publication Townhall posted a story about that tweet with the headline, “Disney Voice Actress and Comedian Sarah Silverman Also Joked About Molesting Children.” The article noted that a Twitter user asked Silverman about the 2009 tweet last year, “Was that supposed to be funny? Cause it wasn’t.”

Silverman responded to the controversy on Thursday.

Sarah Silverman@SarahKSilverman
 Some very odd people R saying I’m a pedo, re: a joke from a time not that long ago when hard absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were — jokes — not a disengenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls (whilst ranting the country’s too PC)

If it’s not okay to joke about Jews or Nazis or Africans, then it’s absolutely not okay to joke about molesting children. If jokes about Jews mean you’re an anti-Semite, and jokes about Africans mean you’re a racist, then jokes about molesting children obviously mean you’re a pedophile and you should be hunted down, disemployed, banned from social media and payment processing, and rejected by all right-thinking citizens.

Those are the rules. The logic is straightforward and impeccable. So deal with it.

They’re twice as wide

It’s amusing to observe the ongoing failure of the equality principle in every aspect and on every side.

So, the van pulled into an Autohof in Germany and we parked a little distance from the cafe/coffee shop/restaurant/news-stand/playground. We needed to stretch our legs, since we’d been on the road for several hours and would be driving for a few more. As we strolled to the Hof, the driver pointed to the parking slots right in front of the doors and shook his head. There were the usual handicapped places, and then two, pink, “Women Only” slots.

Not pregnant women, not elderly women, not women with small children, just women.

Oh come on! You have to be kidding me. What became of Grrrrrrrrl Power!? What became of “I am woman, hear me roar”? Women are so delicate that we need parking slots even closer than the designated handicapped places?

What became of them? They were nonsense from the start. The sooner everyone finally gets around to admitting that there is no such thing as sexual equality, there never was, and there never will be, the sooner society can be restructured on rational and sustainable grounds.

Introducing the Devstream

A number of people have been asking me to do the occasional Darkstream dedicated to games and game development, so I gave it a shot last night and it appears to have been reasonably well received. Because I anticipate considerably more discussion on this front in the coming months, and because a lot of the people interested in it will have no interest in the other subjects regularly addressed here, I’m not going to post Devstreams here, but on the DevGame blog instead.

The interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we’ve been fighting the tendency of a certain group of players – who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them – and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you’ve played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic – yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks – what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way that you can’t even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.

And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it’s a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that’s ok, that’s fine if that’s if that’s what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they’ve been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents – and it’s obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it’s not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept – it’s basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, “you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!” And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that’s what’s different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they’re trying to limit it through the level designs they’re trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.

I can’t say more about this at the moment, but there is a very real possibility that we will soon be moving Alt-Hero into the game space as well as the movie space in the not-too-distant future. So, it’s best to be prepared for that.

Damn straight

Never much liked Stereopony, and I’d put Scandal above Doll$boxx, but they definitely got the #1 band right. They’re just spectacularly good. Even the soft poppy new song is well-written and has got the big chorus as well as a nice bass line.

On with Alex

An open thread for those who would like to live-comment my appearance on the Alex Jones show at 1 PM Central.

The stream is here.

NOW LIVE: Bestselling comic author, editor & video game designer joins todays broadcast to explain his pro-West work including an SJW-free alternative to Wikipedia and more.

Retarded rhetoric

I understand that the elite in Washington thinks Americans are stupid. But how dumb do you have to be to preen and posture about “self-determination” and “spreading democracy” for nearly 100 years, only to turn around and reject the overwhelming results of a free and fair referendum:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement Wednesday saying the US “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”

“The United States calls on Russia to respect the principles to which it has long claimed to adhere and to end its occupation of Crimea,” the statement reads. Pompeo is also expected to state in congressional testimony Wednesday that the United States will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, a European diplomat briefed by the State Department told CNN.

Pompeo’s declaration comes after President Donald Trump had appeared to cast doubt on his administration’s commitment to Ukraine’s claims over the peninsula. Asked by reporters on Air Force One at the end of June whether the United States would recognize Russia’s claim on Crimea, Trump ambiguously responded: “We’re going to have to see.”

Perhaps it’s just a negotiating point. Perhaps it’s just for show. Regardless, it’s stupid and totally unconvincing. Self-contradictory rhetoric is the worst and least effective kind of rhetoric.