#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Crypto.Fashion and Dark Lord Designs have FOUR new t-shirt designs for you. This one is my favorite of the four: AMERICANS Are Dreamers Too. So white and triggering!
Here are the others:
It’s all Idka now. As the Brainstormers know, we’ve been trying out a new Swedish Facebook alternative called Idka. It has a lot of advantages over Facebook, particularly because they don’t use your data, sell your data, or invade your privacy. Better yet, they let you control your groups and organizations very strictly. It’s got chat too.
We’ve already got an Arkhaven organization there which we’re using in a quasi-Dropbox capacity and I’ve set up an ELOE group there as well, so if you’re not interested in having Mark Zuckerberg sell the pictures of your cousin’s children to sketchy companies in Turkey and Indonesia, I would strongly suggest getting off Facebook and giving Idka a whirl. You can find me there as well, and if you would like an invite to the ELOE group, let me know on Idka.
Just to be clear, I have no interest in Idka nor do I have anything to do with it, it’s just a new tech company with a better (if occasionally esoteric) interface and a lack of interest in exploiting user data like a Muslim rape gang exploiting a drug-addicted 14-year-old British girl without a father in Rotherham.
In the long run, Facebook wants to make its product even more immersive and personal than it is now. It wants people to buy video chatting and personal assistant devices for their homes, and plans to announce those products this spring, say people familiar with the matter. It wants users to dive into Facebook-developed virtual worlds. It wants them to use Facebook Messenger to communicate with businesses, and to store their credit-card data on the app so they can use it to make payments to friends.
Employees have begun to worry that the company won’t be able to achieve its biggest goals if users decide that Facebook isn’t trustworthy enough to hold their data. At the meeting on Tuesday, the mood was especially grim. One employee told a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter that the only time he’d felt as uncomfortable at work, or as responsible for the world’s problems, was the day Donald Trump won the presidency.
It looks like Mark Zuckerberg is about to learn the difference between influence and power.
Lawmakers are demanding to hear directly from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on the growing controversy over the misuse of its data by Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica, as the social network confronts its most serious political crisis ever in Washington.
“I want to know why this happened, and what’s the extent of the damage, and how they’re going to fix it moving forward,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Tuesday when asked about the briefings. Facebook executives, she added, “aren’t coming yet, but they better come.”
What Senator Klobuchar doesn’t understand is that Facebook’s business model, indeed, its entire existence, depends upon being able to violate her privacy concerns. And so much for trying to direct the selected outrage and Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign.
Facebook users are waking up to just how much private information they have handed over to third-party apps. Users are sharing their shock on Twitter at discovering that thousands of software plugins for Facebook have been gathering their data. Some of the better known apps that may be connected to your profile include those of popular sites like Amazon, Buzzfeed, Expedia, Etsy, Instagram, Spotify and Tinder.
I’m getting a little tired of people who are dumb enough to keep lunging at the first word that comes out of Trump’s mouth when he is confronted by the media about some new development. OF COURSE HE DOESN’T TELL THEM THE TRUTH! If the God-Emperor was in the habit of practicing perfect honesty when speaking to a group of people who are out to destroy him, he wouldn’t have been nominated, let alone elected. FFS, he’s been President for over a year now, have you learned nothing about how the man operates?
Meanwhile, the British media is freaking out because despite whatever he is supposed to have told Theresa May, President Trump has made it eminently clear that he has no intention whatsoever of backing Britain in their idiotic neocon-inspired war on Russia:
Trump defies aides to congratulate Putin on election ‘victory’ in phone call and fails to challenge him over Salisbury nerve agent outrage. Donald Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin on reelection in telephone call. Overture will fuel fears that allies’ support for Britain is less than full-hearted.
Donald Trump has risked a split with Britain by congratulating Vladimir Putin on his re-election – and failing to mention the Salisbury nerve agent scandal. The US president seemingly defied the advice of aides to praise Mr Putin in a phone call despite UK fury at Russia’s involvement in the poisoning of a former spy. Mr Trump did not challenge his counterpart over the outrage on British soil, and said afterwards that they had a ‘very good call’.
The news will raise fresh concerns about the commitment of the UK’s allies to hold Russia to account over the use of military-grade Novichok poison against Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Translation: the president knows perfectly well that Russia was not responsible and that it was a false flag. Now, here is a heuristic that I have found very useful in understanding the words and actions of Donald Trump. If he has said two contradictory things, and one of them is to his base and the other is to the media, the thing that will be false is what he is telling the media. Because unlike Clinton and Obama, the media is not on his side. Unlike Bush and Bush, he knows that the media is not on his side.
Meanwhile, the God-Emperor would do well to fire those treacherous aides who are seeking to push war with Russia Russia Russia. It won’t surprise me if he does, or to learn that he used the episode to smoke out more Deep Staters in his employ.
It’s called “immigration-based identity politics” and it’s merely a matter of scale:
Drop into a political gathering almost anywhere in America, and you can usually name the party just by looking: Democrats increasingly reflect the racially mixed demographics of the nation’s cities; Republicans remain overwhelmingly white, older and more rural.
That hasn’t always been true — a generation ago, the voters supporting the two parties were far more alike.
Now, a new, large-scale study has documented how much the mix of voters who support each of the two parties has changed. The conclusion: The two party coalitions are now more different than at any point in the past generation.
The Democrats have changed the most, as the mix of voters who support them has grown less white, less religious, more college-educated, younger and more liberal over the past decade, according to the study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Nothing has changed except a) the source nations, and b) the numbers. Previous generations of immigrants all voted Democrat too and continue to do so today. Irish, Italians, Jews, they all voted for more government handouts and in the interests of their own people at the expense of the native stock. Now the Chinese, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Somalis are doing the same thing, it’s just that there are more of them, they look more obviously different, and their values and traditions are even more opposed to American values and traditions.
Meanwhile, except for the growing number of single white women who need government support because they can’t provide for themselves and their illegitimate children, white people are increasingly gravitating to a single party in order to defend what remains of their interests.
So, what Pew is observing is nothing less than the large-scale transformation of white people from ideology-based politics to identity-based politics in a single generation. As I predicted several years ago, the two major parties will be the White Party and the Not-White Party, regardless of what they are officially called in order to maintain the pretense of a single nation.
The Z-Man has a good post on the inertia of the more traditional elite and their inability to recognize or do anything about the problems that their neo-liberal world order cannot address:
The first time I did any serious reading of the Roman Empire, the thought that was always with me was why they never thought to downsize. The cost of conquering Gaul was relatively low, so it made sense to do it, but the cost of hanging onto it never seemed to make sense. The same was even more obvious with Britania. By the third century, it should have been obvious, at least from our perspective, that the Empire needed to be downsized and re-organized. Yet, that was never a part of the logic of the Empire.
I had a similar thought when reading about the Thirty Years War the first time. The Habsburgs were exhausting themselves trying to preserve something that was probably not worth the effort. Of course, we look at these things in hindsight and from a modern perspective. It seems silly to care about the local religious practices, but important people did care about these things and still do. Still, when I read about the rise and fall of empires, I end up thinking through the alternatives, wondering why they were never considered.
The answer is probably the simplest one. People, even the shrewdest rulers, live and plan within their allotted time on earth. Even the Chinese, who take the very long view of things, act in the moment most of the time. People can think about how their actions will impact their descendants a century from now, but it will never have the same emotional tug as how their contemporaries think of them in the moment. That’s just human nature. Most men will trade the applause of today for being remembered long after he is dead.
That’s probably what we are seeing with the current struggles of Western elites to keep this house of cards together. The “liberal international order” is the perfection of a solution to problems of the long gone past. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, the great challenge in the West was over borders, economics and conflict resolution. After a long bloody series of experiments, the West finally figured out something that worked to keep the peace, maximize material wealth and settle disputes in an orderly fashion.
The trouble is, the current arrangements are not answering the questions of this age. In fact, they appear to be exacerbating the problems that face the West.
This isn’t the whole problem, of course. But it does explain some of the mysterious ineptitude and ineffectual handwaving of the governing elites to even begin to do anything about the problems that are so readily apparent to so many people throughout the West.
Unlike the Romans, however, the West is also burdened by hostile interests, some of them foreign, some of them not, which actively want to destroy all three of the pillars of the West, Christianity, the Graeco-Roman legacy, and the European races.
Good fathers hope their sons will know peace, but prepare them for war:
“There is a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.”—Jorah Mormont
Men were made for violence. It’s part of why they were created. To protect the weak. To fight for themselves and for nations. To compete and to win.
Do you know why men like football? Why they watch boxing? Why Romans watched the gladiators slaughter each other? Because part of men was made for violence and their instincts draw them to it. We cannot suppress human nature. We cannot half-embrace who and what we are—how God made us, and how we are built.
It’s fun to play Advanced Squad Leader. But as the late, great Jerry Pournelle taught us, there will be war. And while it’s important to learn how to shoot a shotgun, it’s arguably even more important to be able to competently direct a combined arms attack on a fortified position, particularly when there is a time limit and enemy reinforcements on the way.
We’re just beginning Turn 3 German of ASLSK S24 Sherman Marches West and the outcome is still definitely in doubt. He hasn’t found my anti-tank gun, but I foolishly left my PzKpfw IIIN with its 75mm popgun fending off the assault in the center, where it is presently bouncing shells off advancing Russian armor while my late model Tiger 1 is holding down the fort doing nothing on the left flank. But while I haven’t managed to deal out much damage, I have been able to chew up two turns without taking any losses, and now I have two platoons of reinforcements arriving.
But win or lose, next up will be our first campaign game, Decision at Elst. And by the way, the latest version of VASL, 6.4.2, running on VASSAL 3.2.17, truly is a work of art. The practical functionality of VASL is still amazing to me even though I’ve been using it since rk first created it more than 20 years ago.
There is observably no free speech in the West anymore, not even for dogs. So, let’s bring back the blasphemy laws and start enforcing those that are still on the books, and jail everyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord or is insufficiently respectful of Christianity and thereby Make Western Civilization Great Again.
A dog owner who filmed his girlfriend’s pug giving Nazi salutes and put it on YouTube revealed on Tuesday he was found guilty of being ‘grossly offensive’ online.
Mark Meechan from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, recorded the dog, Buddha, responding to statements such as ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Sieg Heil’ by raising its paw.
The 30-year-old was arrested for allegedly committing a hate crime after he uploaded the footage to YouTube in April of 2016.
Now, how is Ricky Gervais not in jail? Spare us all the high-minded farblegarble about “free speech” and “an open society”. Everyone is now aware that it was always just an anti-Christian con.
A self-proclaimed atheist, The Office creator and 2012 Golden Globes host ruffled feathers for portraying himself as Jesus Christ in his “12 Days of Rickmas” PETA campaign.
That is far more grossly offensive than a pug raising its paw. And here is a question. Why wasn’t the girlfriend arrested for naming her dog “Buddha”?
Sacre bleu! I have been expecting more than a few high-level arrests to take place as a result of the Draining of the Swamp, but I was not expecting one of them to be a President of the Fifth Republic!
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody on Tuesday as part of an investigation that he received millions of euros in illegal financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
A judicial source with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press that Sarkozy was being held at the Nanterre police station, west of Paris. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Sarkozy and his former chief of staff have denied wrongdoing in the case, which involves funding for his winning 2007 presidential campaign.
Though an investigation has been underway since 2013, the case gained traction some three years later when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site, Mediapart, that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff Claude Gueant.
A lawyer for Sarkozy did not immediately respond to a message from the AP seeking comments. Investigators are examining claims that Gadhafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros overall for the 2007 campaign.
Now, it is possible that this has nothing at all to do with Trump’s swamp-draining. But considering all the shady connections between Clinton, Obama, Libya, Gadhafi, and the death of the US Ambassador to Libya, I tend to doubt it.
Macron is certainly proving to be a more interesting, and potentially more independent, character than I expected him to be.
China unveils the next step in Big Social:
China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.
People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.
Those found to have committed financial wrongdoings, such as employers who failed to pay social insurance or people who have failed to pay fines, would also face these restrictions, said the statements which were dated 2 March.
The move is in line with President’s Xi Jinping’s plan to construct a social credit system based on the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted,” said one of the notices which was signed by eight ministries, including the country’s aviation regulator and the Supreme People’s Court.
China has flagged plans to roll out a system that will allow government bodies to share information on its citizens’ trustworthiness and issue penalties based on a so-called social credit score.
This is a brilliant application of what Big Social is doing, only instead of allowing the hand-picked SJWs of the Twitter Trust and Safety Council or the Facebook-endorsed SPLC to do the restricting, the Chinese government will do it. And why not? The basic principle has been established and broadly accepted, from Twitter to the Her Majesty’s Government. As Q said, “why are trips allowed?”
Imagine if the God-Emperor and his Grand Inquisitor were to launch a similar program in the United States. After all, who has proven themselves more untrustworthy than Facebook? How could the SJWs legitimately complain if Mark Zuckerberg and his executives found themselves placed under permanent restriction? This principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted” is merely an adaptation of Facebook’s own approach to banning thoughtcrime and legally controlling the public discourse, and it represents a welcome return to pre-Enlightenment philosophy on the part of a people who were always rightly dubious about it being genuine. There can be no “freedom of speech” in any non-Western, non-Christian, non-American society, because the concept doesn’t even make sense in any other context.
If you wanted to keep what passed for free speech in America, then you shouldn’t have permitted entry to Catholics and Jews, followed by wave after wave of various peoples whose beliefs and cultural traditions are entirely antithetical to the concept. And given those waves of immigration, you can’t be surprised that it’s no longer even possible to publicly state that a man is not a woman without negative legal and social and employment and financial consequences.
The devil, of course, is in the definitions. But the devil is out. Let’s not shed too many tears for the SJWs once they discover the difference between “influence” and “power”, for as another Chinese leader once said, “power comes from the barrel of a gun”. It does not come from control of a momentarily popular software application.
Does the storm cometh at last?
