Author: VD

Mailvox: Superconverged

A reader has a scoop about DC’s Supergirl television show:

Inside info from the set of Supergirl.  It was already converged.  I didn’t think they could converge it any more.  But they found a way. In the upcoming season, the heroes and the “good guys” won’t have any assault weapons.  They are de-gunning them.  No projectile weapons.  No SWAT gear or tactical vests. They even have a special anti-bumpstock bit of business planned. 

This new approach on the part of DC is certainly going to have some interesting implications for The Punisher, to say the least, if Marvel follows suit.

All offense, no defense

It’s always enlightening to see how the media reacts like vampires exposed to sunlight whenever they find themselves on the other side of the investigation:

CBS has been using NDAs to try and suppress potential sources for an upcoming exposé about Charlie Rose’s sexual misconduct. And top network execs who worked on Rose’s shows are panicking that they’ll be accused of turning a blind eye to his sexual misconduct.

We’re told that CBS News president David Rhodes, “CBS This Morning” executive producer Ryan Kadro, “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager and former “CBS This Morning” executive producer Chris Licht are all terrified about a looming Washington Post investigation that’s now been in the works for months.

“There are a lot of executives looking around corners, hoping they’re not named in the story,” an industry insider told us. “[CBS is] trying to suppress [the story] by using the NDAs.” Meanwhile, said the source, “Jeff, Ryan and David are all waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Kadro oversaw Rose — who was fired in November 2017 after the Washington Post reported that eight women alleged he had sexually harassed them — while Fager was Rose’s boss at “60 Minutes” and Licht hired Rose to co-anchor “CBS This Morning.”

Hey, CBS, remember, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up! And as usual, those who profess to be professionals somehow manage to abandon all semblance of professionalism and their much-ballyhooed training the moment it is their own ox being gored.

It’s almost as if being trained to be impartial doesn’t actually work… which when you think about it tends to make sense. There is no reason to believe that journalists retain any more of their J-school classes than any other college graduate with a liberal arts degree.

Actual headline

London Mayor Implements ‘Knife Control.’ Ben Shapiro Responds With Perfect Tweet. Internet Melts Down.

Conservatives. It’s astonishing how easy it is for their enemies to lead them around by the nose.

Media: Here are your opinion leaders. You will follow them!
Conservatives: Hah! That Ben Shapiro, he’s sharp as a tack, he is! He sure showed those cheese-eating surrender monkeys!

This very important news story about Ben Shapiro’s Twitter prowess by James Barrett presently has 39.3k views. Keep that in mind when you find yourself chortling about how stupid liberals are.

On an almost completely unrelated note, it is even more amusing to see that the Pakistani mayor of London actually implemented a policy that had hitherto been a joke among the pro-gun crowd. Is it time to start the National Butterknife Association?

Motto: Knives don’t kill people. People kill people.

On the plus side, the knife controllers won’t have to pry any knives out of cold dead hands, since the butter tends to make them a little more slippery.

Wikipedia: the information manager

This little exchange on a Wikipedia Talk page demonstrates the vital importance of Infogalactic as well as the fact that even the highest-ranking Wikipedians are well aware of the Planetary Knowledge Core and its potential significance. You will note that Wikipedia admins are primarily concerned with managing “publicity” and concealing relevant information from the public instead of making it available to them.

Pictures of murderers?
Is there a reason why they are not shown in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.142.184.18 (talk) 19:05, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Why do you want to give them publicity? Doug Weller talk 19:40, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

They’re available on Infogalactic here: https://infogalactic.com/info/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.228.112.21 (talk) 22:32, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

The pictures of those disgusting criminals are shown in nearly all news articles covering the event. I think we should show the pictures so their faces are forever associated with that act of evil they committed. Mr Ernie (talk) 18:02, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not here to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, that’s not a good reason. As for the IP’s comment, Infogalactic is an alt-right website created by Vox Day and a bad example. Doug Weller talk 06:31, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

User:Doug Weller their photographs were routinely shown by the local newspaper (The Knoxville News Sentinel). There were constant updates about the trial by reporter Jamie Satterfield, whose reporting probably constitutes the bulk of all reporting about this saga. I don’t understand your argument that showing their photos gives them “publicity.” It’s also a bit odd for you to ascribe RIGHTGREATWRONGS to my comment. There is nothing to RIGHT as they were convicted of their crimes. Mr Ernie (talk) 14:11, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

IIn any case, “so their faces are forever associated with that act of evil they committed.” means to me that your reason is not that it would be encyclopedic but you want to use the article to as you say associate their faces etc. But no one or at least no one who wasn’t closely involved is ever going to remember their faces. Although I guess they might remember they were black. Which would be a terrible reason to include their faces of course. It would certainly publicise that fact. Doug Weller talk 14:40, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

The Wikipedia editor attempting to bury the fact that the murderers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom were black is an administrator on the English Wikipedia for 9 years, 6 months and 23 days, who is on the Arbitration Committee, has checkuser rights, and is an oversighter on the English Wikipedia. He is also is identified to the Wikimedia Foundation as one with access to nonpublic data.

And the fact that the 536 active administrators are almost uniformly SJWs intent on utilizing Wikipedia for social justice is why Infogalactic will be an increasingly vital resource in years to come. Infogalactic is not “an alt-right website”, and this will become increasingly clear to even the most inveterate SJWs over time.

Fantaisie, utopie, égalité

As I have repeatedly observed, there is no such thing as equality, the grand rhetorical flights of Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding. The artificial distinctions that conservatives attempt to make between equality of opportunity and equality of result, and between equality before the law and  equality of condition, simply do not exist. Literally every day we see material evidence to the contrary.

A rookie cop whose dad is an NYPD chief avoided getting fired after an off-duty arrest for groping a woman at an Atlantic City casino, police sources told the Daily News. The department’s handling of Officer Joseph Essig’s case raises questions among police sources who suspect high-ranking officers and those close to them are treated with kid gloves in discipline cases.

Just 15 months into his brand-new NYPD career — on Oct. 8, 2015 — Essig was arrested at Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City on a felony charge of criminal sexual misconduct. New Jersey authorities downgraded the charge to a health code violation. Essig pleaded guilty, was ordered to stay away from the victim, and paid a $1,000 fine.

Officers facing similar charges with less than two years on the force are typically fired, say sources. But Essig remains on the job. A police source said that’s “shocking.” “Other probationary cops have been fired for way less,” said the source.

This is not at all surprising, of course. Just as one does not expect off-duty police to receive speeding tickets or DUI citations, one does not expect the influential or their family members to be treated just like anyone else in the courts of law. But as petty as it is, this episode serves to effectively demonstrate that the conservative concept of equality is just as fantastic, just as utopian, just as nonexistent, and just as ludicrous a basis for societal policy, as the leftist concept of equality.

God does not believe in equality. Nature does not believe in equality. Neither should Man believe in it, must less attempt to order his societies around it, because it does not exist.

The reason that Jefferson found it necessary to claim it was self-evident that all men are created equal is because he could not find a single observable example of that imaginary equality to cite, not in religion, philosophy, history, nature, or law. The assertion is not a self-evident truth, it is nothing more than a logical and empirical falsehood, and easily proven to be so by every possible standard.

For a deeper dive into the mythical nature of equality, one cannot do better than to read Equality: the Impossible Quest by historian Martin van Creveld.

Right Ho, Jeeves #2

Arkhaven Comics is very pleased to be able to announce the release of its first Gold Logo edition comic, RIGHT HO, JEEVES #2: Hungry Hearts. As of the moment, it is only available from Castalia Books direct, but you can already order it from your local bookstore, though not from your local comic book store… yet.

As for Amazon, at this point, who knows….

Anyhow, Right Ho, Jeeves #2 is 24 pages and retails for $2.99.

Now, I know some Alt★Hero backers are wondering if we’re actually working on it, but believe me, we are. Every single day, including weekends. Precisely ZERO of the people working on these other comics are also involved with either the Alt★Hero or the Avalon comics. We’re using these early releases to shake out the various bugs in the process and answer questions like “what paper can we use”, “to what extent can we push the margins”, “what retail price do we need to set in order to prevent the distribution database from discount-blocking us” and various other ones that literally no one could answer for us. Some of these things require experiments and we did not want to experiment with our primary products.

Which, by the way, is why I can tell you that both Alt★Hero and Avalon single issues will be published in the royal octavo size (same as Jeeves and QM) and will retail for $2.99.

Facebook tracks non-users

They might as well go ahead and shut Facebook down now, given the latest revelations and those that are still to come. The number of laws that Zuckerberg’s company has broken must be in the triple digits by now:

Facebook’s problems just keep accumulating, drip by drip—or more like splash by splash. It’s now been discovered that Facebook not only collects and uses the personal data of its members but also collects the data of those who never signed up for Facebook.

So if you’re one of those who blames Facebook users for allowing their personal data to be compromised, don’t be so smug. Facebook may be sharing your personal data as well.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, discovered that, although he never joined Facebook or any other social network, Facebook has a detailed profile on him.

Facebook obtains information from those not on Facebook in two different ways: from other Facebook users and by tracking people who visit other other sites on the web.

I can’t believe Trump hasn’t taken this opportunity to booster his popularity by coming out hard against Big Social yet. He must be occupied with something even more important….

The opposite of progress

Modern progressivism has led to an increasingly dysgenic reality:

The potential problem was first noted by Galton in 1869. In the 1930s Raymond Cattell was pretty sure that the greater fertility of poorer and duller couples was going to bring down the population average, but was surprised to find that the data showed a contrary trend. Perhaps this was because the effects of copious fertilizer overcame a drop in the quality of the seed, but results are results, and the dysgenic hypothesis looked weak. Of course, to continue the agricultural analogy, yields could also be adversely affected by over-use of pesticides. One possible cause of less capable brains is that these sensitive organs are being poisoned by man-made toxins.

All this and more is covered in the introduction to a new paper:

What Caused over a Century of Decline in General Intelligence? Testing Predictions from the Genetic Selection and Neurotoxin Hypotheses Michael A. Woodley of Menie & Matthew A. Sarraf & Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre & Heitor B. F. Fernandes & David Becker

What are we to make of all this? The Woodley et al. argument is that general intelligence, the important and heritable part of mental ability, is falling; and that specific skills, the environmentally-influenced non-heritable part of mental ability, had risen over the last century and is now on a plateau.

The supportive findings are as follows: if you take the g loadings of mental tests (their saturation on the general factor of intelligence) and you link those loadings with the effect sizes of things like inbreeding depression and correlations with motor reaction times, then the strength of selection against intelligence (duller citizens having larger families) is more pronounced on g loaded abilities, but correlates negatively with the Flynn Effect (the secular rise in many, but not all mental tests).

So, it is better to track general ability rather than specific specialised skills.

Well, regardless of whatever might have caused this decline in Western intelligence, it’s nothing that importing a few hundred million sub-85 IQ third-worlders shouldn’t fix, right?

Rebel Dead Revenge in print

Dark Legion Comics is very pleased to announce that the 42-page teaser for Rebel Dead Revenge is now in print. This will be the only single-issue print comic from the series, as the rest will be either digital or one of the two trade paperbacks. The idea is to have something inexpensive that can introduce the trade paperbacks to readers in comic book stores.

Stonewall’s Arm is a 42-page, 10×7 Gold Logo edition that retails for $4.99. It is available now at Castalia Books Direct and is supposed to be in stock later this week on Amazon. However, Amazon’s track record in this regard has been spotty at best, so the Castalia option is the safer one.

We are hoping to have an Arkhaven announcement later today, but the proof has not yet been approved by the printer, so that may take place later this week. Just to be clear, it is not Alt-Hero-related. The first issues of AH and CDA are expected to be out later this month.

Everyone is an anti-semite

Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, leader of right-wing Fidesz

Orban has plastered Hungary with billboards urging resistance to the alleged “Soros plan” of destroying Europe with immigration and the civil society groups that the 87-year-old funds. For critics, the imagery and language used in this campaign against the Jewish Soros have more than a whiff of anti-Semitism.

Jeremy Corybn, Member of the British Parliament, leader of left-wing Labour.

If you take Jeremy Corbyn at his word, then the leader of Britain’s Labour Party is no anti-Semite. It’s just that, like the Wild West preacher who keeps accidentally wandering into Fannie Porter’s house of ill repute, Corbyn has an odd knack for stumbling into the arms of the Hebraically disinclined.

Donald Trump, President of the United States, Republican Party