Author: VD

Facebook is in SERIOUS trouble

It turns out that the Obama campaign did the same thing that Cambridge Analytica did… only with Facebook’s full knowledge and approval:

A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the [Facebook-based app] gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85{8f3a20e95123fc761e5b6545cdcf28fe932999778b1965cb4dd78a3d9b063320} of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind.

Let’s see… 5 million times $40,000 is $200 billion in potential FTC fines. Another $200 billion on top of the $2 trillion they might already owe.

The machine uprising has begun

I’m still trying to figure out how self-driving cars can possibly be economically viable, considering the ruinous insurance costs that will be involved:

A self-driving Uber car hit and killed a pedestrian as she was crossing the road in the first fatality involving the controversial fleet of autonomous vehicles. Elaine Herzberg, 49, was hit by an SUV around 10pm on Sunday in Tempe, Arizona, when she was walking outside of a crosswalk. She was immediately rushed to the hospital where she died from her injuries, ABC 15 reported. Tempe Police say the SUV was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash.

The patience of the Grand Inquisitor

I have to admit, despite being an early fan, I have been exceedingly frustrated with Jeff Sessions’s seeming passivity myself. But it’s hard to argue with the point that he has quietly made more progress draining the Swamp than anyone in the government that we’ve ever seen.

Sessions is the quintessential Eagle Scout.  He will follow the rules down to the last subclause and will not make his move until every “t” has been crossed and every “i” dotted.

We saw the first results of this approach last Friday – in dealing with Andrew McCabe, this century’s prime example of a “cookie full of arsenic.”

Sessions waited until the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (which is run by Assistant Director Candice Will, who was appointed by Robert Mueller, of all people) recommended that McCabe be fired.  He then had McCabe officially informed beforehand, following established procedure to the letter.

This comes under the rubric of “strategy,” a concept unfortunately foreign to too many active conservatives.  A large number of cons recognize only one course of action: a headlong charge against the closest target while howling at the top of their lungs.  Not only do they dismiss any more subtle form of action, but they often attack those engaging in it of cowardice or corruption, or of being an “Alinskyite-Obamaist commie stooge” – despite the fact that their kamikaze runs usually end up heading over the nearest cliff.

So it was with Sessions, who has been routinely dismissed as “paid off,” being “asleep under his desk,” or as “part of the swamp.”

Sessions took his time, did things according to the book, and dealt the swamp a good, stiff blow while leaving its denizens little recourse but to throw tantrums in the media, which they have been doing the weekend long.  Compare this to all the would-be conservative champions – McCarthy, LeBoutillier, Moore – piled up under the cliff while the leftist monolith trundles on nearly unscathed.

At this point, having taken multiple scalps at the FBI alone, the man has earned more than a little slack. There is some reason to be optimistic that the winning in this regard hasn’t even seriously begun.

Why I delinked Alpha Game

A number of people have asked me why I stopped blogging at Alpha Game, and then, delisted it from the Day Trips here. The answer is pretty simple: I got bored of the subject, bored of the discussions of the subject, and was beginning to find the people who wanted to discuss the subject to be increasingly tedious as well.

The social heuristic of the socio-sexual hierarchy is, in my opinion, one of the most valuable ideas I have ever encountered. In my opinion, it is up there with Taleb’s concept of uncertainty and the Black Swan. I use it effectively on an almost daily basis, both in my work and in my personal life. I use it to anticipate and avoid problems, to artfully resolve situations that arise, to advise others, and to plan for the future. I use it to present a broader range of characters in my writing and to better understand the perspectives from which the authors I am editing are writing.

Which is why I’m simply not at all interested in trying to prove its legitimacy or its utility to doubters anymore. I’m not interested in trying to explain socio-sexual theory 101 when I am actively implementing its practical applications. Nor am I interested in listening to the endless nattering from the gammas that a) gamma isn’t even a thing, b) there is nothing wrong with being a gamma, c) being a gamma is better than being an alpha, d) they’re totally alphas when they’re not busy being Navy SEALs, and e) they’re not gammas, I’m the gamma.

And above all, I am aggressively disinterested in listening to the constant and inescapable refrain of “what about me” and “where do I rank” heard from nearly every male individual who encounters the theory for the first time. I am not the socio-sexual police nor do I convey a place on the hierarchy to anyone… and the mere fact that anyone would turn to me to provide it is indicative of a complete failure to grasp the concept in the first place. I am merely an observer of human behavior who happens to be aware of a few behavioral patterns that most people reliably exhibit.

Wardogs Inc. #1: Battlesuit Bastards

All war is murder for profit. 

Some organizations are just more open about it.

WARDOGS INCORPORATED is one of the largest and most professional mercenary corporations operating in the Kantillon subsector. If you need a bodyguard, an assassination team, or an armored cavalry regiment complete with air support, WARDOGS Inc. can provide it for you… for a very steep price.

Tommy Falkland is proud to be a Wardog. And he’s delighted when WDI’s executives sign a massive contract to arrange for a little regime change on a no-account low-tech planet that looks like a highly profitable cakewalk. But when the transportation company unexpectedly fails to deliver their armor and artillery dirtside, Tommy and his fellow Wardogs find themselves caught in the middle of the killing zone.

And there they learn that bullets will kill a man dead just as quickly as a plasma bolt.

Created by Vox Day and set in the universe of Quantum Mortis, BATTLESUIT BASTARDS is the first book in the Wardogs Inc. military science fiction series written by G.D. Stark. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

Some of you have been saying you want more Quantum Mortis. Well, here is more Quantum Mortis. Graven Tower is not the protagonist, but the events taking place in the new series are roughly contiguous with those of A Man Disrupted and are occurring in the same subsector. You can consider Wardogs Inc. to be one of our responses to the stunning success of Nick Cole’s bestselling Galaxy’s Edge series…. but there are others on the way soon. And yes, Wardogs Inc. will be appearing in comic book form, illustrated and colored by the two gentlemen responsible for the action-packed cover.

And “action-packed” barely begins to describe this series. It is, like the Wardogs themselves, off the chain. An excerpt from Chapter 1:

We unceremoniously stuffed the bodies into the small personnel airlock and flushed them out into space.

“Sergeant Thrasher, cargo is clean,” I reported.

“Find anything interesting?”

“Mostly just industrial equipment. Construction stuff,” I said. Four-eyes cut in, “To be precise, mining equipment.”

“Roger,” Squid said. “No problems?”

“Nothing illegal. Some more slug-throwers though, in wood crates,” I said.

“Not our business. Everyone meet up on the bridge in five. We’ve cleared our bodies here, we’ll finish there.”

“Roger,” I replied. Park hammered the tops back on the boxes, then exited cargo. I reset the seals on the door and we headed up to the bridge. It wasn’t a huge ship, so no lifts. Just ladders and stairs like an old atomic model.

We entered the bridge just as Private Ward was dragging out the body of the captain. Park saluted the dead man ironically and Jock laughed.

“Now what?” I said.

“Now we wait for a new crew,” said Squid from the late captain’s chair, a flask in his hand. “Lieutenant says their ship is on the way and they should be here within the hour. At ease for now.”

I looked around the bridge. Everything looked clean and well-maintained, though it was an older ship. Garamond read the name plate on the wall. Registration 1001x235htfg22789.113. Gruppo ENIL-EX, Valatesta.

I took off my helmet and set it on the navigation table next to a personal tablet, still displaying a colorful picture story its owner would never finish. Probably lots of time to read on freighters.

Almost exactly an hour later, a sleek black transport pulled alongside and hailed us. A few moments later, the boarding party joined us. The men wore the same navy blue jumpsuits of the guys we’d just spaced. Gruppo ENIL-EX uniforms, I assumed.

Their leader engaged with Sergeant Thrasher and a severe little man walked up to me. “Do you mind?” he said, then powered up the nav board. He tossed the tablet onto a chair as I gathered up my helmet.

“Good to meet you too,” I said, getting out of his way.

“Hmm,” he said, keying in some numbers.

“So,” I pressed, partly because I was annoyed, “got a hot date, then?”

“Not likely on Ulixis,” he sniffed.

“What? You don’t like furry chicks?” I remember jokes about the women of Ulixis, though I really only had a vague idea where the place was.

“Go away, Wardog, I’m working,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.

I considered shooting him in the back of the head, just on principle, then decided I’d rather not lose my bonus today. Squid didn’t take kindly to freelancing.

Facebook: failure or fraud?

It’s fascinating to see that after all the ways that Big Social is spying on everyone, what has the media in an uproar is the belated realization that a sword can always cut two ways. They didn’t mind when they knew it was the Obama, Hillary, and the SJW-converged corporations that were data-mining, but now that they realize the Right – and in particular, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump – can and have done exactly the same thing, they suddenly have reservations about the wisdom of letting organizations have access to that level of data.

Facebook is facing an existential test, and its leadership is failing to address it.

Good leaders admit mistakes, apologize quickly, show up where they’re needed and show their belief in the company by keeping skin in the game.

Facebook executives, in contrast, react to negative news with spin and attempts to bury it. Throughout the last year, every time bad news has broken, executives have downplayed its significance. Look at its public statements last year about how many people had seen Russian-bought election ads — first it was 10 million, then it was 126 million.

Top execs dodged Congress when it was asking questions about Russian interference. They are selling their shares at a record clip.

The actions of Facebook execs now recall how execs at Nokia and Blackberry reacted after the iPhone emerged. Their revenues kept growing for a couple years — and they dismissed the threats. By the time users started leaving in droves, it was too late.

There’s no outside attacker bringing Facebook down. It’s a circular firing squad that stems from the company’s fundamental business model of collecting data from users, and using that data to sell targeted ads. For years, users went along with the bargain. But after almost a year of constant negative publicity, their patience may be waning.

Facebook did not initially respond to questions or a request for comment from CNBC.

Here is a less generous theory. We know that Facebook was being propped up by the CIA from the start. But the CIA is now under the control of the God-Emperor. Which means that a) Facebook’s dirty laundry is more likely to come out, and, b) Facebook is not going to be financially propped up the way it has been from the very beginning.

Which, of course, raises the interesting question about whether it ever was a viable business at all. Or even a legal one.

Facebook may face more legal trouble than you might think in the wake of Cambridge Analytica’s large-scale data harvesting. Former US officials David Vladeck and Jessica Rich have told the Washington Post that Facebook’s data sharing may violate the FTC consent decree requiring that it both ask for permission before sharing data and report any authorized access. The “Thisisyourdigitallife” app at the heart of the affair asked for permission from those who directly used it, but not the millions of Facebook friends whose data was taken in the process.

If the FTC did find violations, Facebook could be on the hook for some very hefty fines — albeit fines that aren’t likely to be as hefty as possible. The decree asks for fines as large as $40,000 per person, but that would amount to roughly $2 trillion. Regulators like the FTC historically push for fines they know companies can pay, which would suggest fines that are ‘just’ in the billion-dollar range. Given that there are already multiple American and European investigations underway, any financial penalty would be just one piece of a larger puzzle.

Would you not just love to see Facebook hit with a $2 trillion fine?

Print editions: the verdict

The early reviews of the first Arkhaven comics are very good. This comes as a relief, because I’m not talking about the art, the characters, the writing, or the story, but about the physical production quality, which was the one element that was a known unknown from the very start of the entire project. We have taken a very aggressive pricing strategy, which combined with the 6.14 x 9.21 royal octavo size and the help of Ingram has enabled us to hit a $3.00 retail price with a full regular distribution discount.

Just got my Jeeves and QM today. Vox, these things are gorgeous. A little smaller than I had calculated, but absolutely beautiful. I don’t think upsizing is worth it, given that this is a lovely product as is. And the coloring is amazing. That background in one panel on page 10 of Right Ho #1 is major league. Fantastic work.
– E Deploribus Unum

I received my QM and Jeeves yesterday. The artwork is well done, with background detail to sustain the story (and in Jeeves case, add more hilarity to the upper class tweaking). The color palettes work very well for both. Dialogues boxes are good, with nice size on the “tell” boxes needed for story background. Nothing looks compressed or stretched out of shape. The smaller size (about 6 x 9 inches) is easier to pack and take places, but still large enough to handle read easily. The heavy cover is amazing – no smudges, deformation, hard to tear. Great idea. Now, about the Hildy poster … any complaints about sexism halt at the muzzle of her weapon. She would be nearly as popular as Dynamique or Rebel.
– SilentDraco

My shipment arrived today. Couldn’t be more pleased. Beautiful work. The top trim on Jeeves was a little tight (though well within industry standards and not worth carping about), and QM was perfect. Colors, paper, binding – everything is wonderful. Bravo! You guys need to be patting yourselves on the back for hitting it out of the park this early in the game. I do notice the smaller size, but the product is definitely nicer than the average comic, and I’d be really surprised if anyone will care. It does not seem worth it to me to upsize it at greater cost. It will still rack in the comic stores just fine. Frankly, I can’t believe you can sell this for $3.00.
– AP

If you haven’t picked up a copy or two yet, you can do so in the Arkhaven section of the Castalia Direct Store. Our next two print editions will be premium Dark Legion projects that will be 10×7 and priced at $6.99 for the 40-page Rebel Dead Revenge teaser and $9.99 for the 64-page Chicago Typewriter. After that, we’ll get Right Ho, Jeeves #2 and Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted #2 out.

All four of these will be Gold Logo editions. The next two after that will be Alt★Hero #1: Crackdown and Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #1: Conscience of the King, both of which will be 10×7 and $3.99. And since everyone loves Rebel, here is a panel from her behind the wheel of her Mustang from Alt★Hero #2: Falls the Hammer.

A portrait of the fall of Britain

Read the notice in full. Note the grammatical deficiencies. Then read John Derbyshire’s thoughts on the matter:

Young Ahmed sneaked into Britain hidden in a truck that brought him through the Channel Tunnel from France. British immigration officers intercepted him. Ahmed told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Let me just repeat that: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

But Ahmed was not refused entry. Instead, he was given free accommodation, first in a charity shelter, then in a pleasant middle-class foster home. [Betrayed by the ‘shy and polite’ boy they took into their home: Iraqi asylum seeker, 18, is found guilty of trying to blow up 93 Parsons Green commuters with bomb built with his foster parents’ Tupperware while pair were on holiday, Daily Mail, March 16, 2018] He was sent to school, at British taxpayer expense of course. His teachers reported him telling them it was his duty as a Muslim to hate Britain.

Today, Friday, March 16, 2018, Ahmed was convicted of making a bomb and trying to detonate it in a London subway train last Fall. Fortunately, the thing didn’t explode properly; but it still left 51 subway passengers with serious burns.

Let me just repeat one more time: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Enoch Powell got it right: “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

Big Social Reeducation

YouTube and Google are teaming up with Wikipedia to dynamically brainwash YouTube video viewers with unrequested textual reeducation sessions.

SW: This has been a year of fake news and misinformation and we have seen the importance of delivering information to our users accurately. There was a lot of stuff happening in the world a year ago. And we said, look, people are coming to our homepage and if we are just showing them videos of gaming or music and something really significant happened in the world, and we are not showing it to them, then in many ways we’re missing this opportunity. We had this discussion internally where people said, you know, ”What do those metrics look like, and are people going to watch that?” We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that we had a responsibility to tell people what was happening in the world. So a year ago, we launched a few things. One of them was this top news shelf. So if you go to search, the information that we show at the top is from authoritative sources, and we limit that to authoritative sources. We also have that you, for example, can be in your home feed with news, looking at gaming, music, other information, something major happens in the world or in your region, and we decide that we’re going to show it to you.

NT: What is authoritative?

SW: Being part of Google, we work with Google News. Google News has a program where different providers can apply to be part of Google News, and then we use a different set of algorithms to determine who within that we consider authoritative. And then based on that we use those news providers in our breaking news shelf, and in our home feed.

NT: And what goes into those algorithms? What are some of the factors you consider when deciding whether something is authoritative or not?

SW: We don’t release what those different factors are. But there could be lots of different things that go into it. These are usually complicated algorithms. You could look at like the number of awards that they have won, like journalistic awards. You can look at the amount of traffic that they have. You could look at the number of people committed to journalistic writing. So, I’m just giving out a few there, but we look at a number of those, and then from that determine—and it’s a pretty broad set. Our goal is to make that fair and accurate.

NT: It’s super complicated because we don’t want to over-bias with established places and make it harder for a new place to come up. Facebook has started evaluating places based on how trustworthy they are and giving out surveys. And one of the obvious problems if you give a survey out and you ask, “Is that trustworthy?” and they’ve never heard of it, they won’t say yes. And that makes it harder for a startup journalistic entity. YouTube is, of course, the place where people start, so that’s tricky.

SW: It is tricky. There are many factors to consider. But the other thing we want to consider here is if there’s something happening in the world, and there is an important news event, we want to be delivering the right set of information. And so, we felt that there was responsibility for us to do that and for us to do that well. We released that a year ago. But I think what we’ve seen is that it’s not really enough. There’s continues to be a lot of misinformation out there.

NT: So I’ve heard.

SW: Yes, so you’ve heard. And the reality is, we’re not a news organization. We’re not there to say, “Oh, let’s fact check this.” We don’t have people on staff who can say, “Is the house blue? Is the house green?” So really the best way for us to do that is for us to be able to look at the publishers, figure out the authoritativeness or reputation of that publisher. And so that’s why we’ve started using that more. So one of the things that we want to announce today that’s new that will be coming in the next couple of weeks is that when there are videos around something that’s a conspiracy—and we’re using a list of well-known internet conspiracies from Wikipedia—that we will show as a companion unit next to the video information from Wikipedia for this event.

NT: YouTube will be sending people to text?

SW: We will be providing a companion unit of text, yes. There are many benefits of text. As much as we love video, we also want to make sure that video and text can work together.

NT: I love them both too.

SW: Yes, you must love text—as a writer. So here’s a video. Let’s see… “Five most believed Apollo landing conspiracies.” There is clear information on the internet about Apollo landings. We can actually surface this as a companion unit, people can still watch the videos, but then they have access to additional information, they can click off and go and see that. The idea here is that when there is something that we have listed as a popular conspiracy theory, the ability for us to show this companion unit.

NT: So the way you’ll identify that something is a popular conspiracy theory is by looking at Wikipedia’s list of popular conspiracy theories? Or you have an in-house conspiracy theory team that evaluates…and how does someone in the audience apply to be on that team? Because that sounds amazing.

SW: We’re just going to be releasing this for the first time in a couple weeks, and our goal is to start with the list of internet conspiracies listed where there is a lot of active discussion on YouTube. But what I like about this unit is it’s actually pretty extensible, for you to be able to watch a video where there’s a question about information and show alternative sources for you as a user to be able to look at and to be able to research other areas as well.

Translation: when you watch a Voxiversity video on YouTube, Google News is going to pop up infoboxes from Wikipedia that will totally disprove the dangerous badthought to which you are foolishly subjecting yourself.

Which gives me an idea….

Anyhow, as usual, the main challenge is that most conservatives would rather whine and cry about how the mean, unfair Left is being mean and unfair again rather than actually do anything about it. Here is yet another article decrying Wikipedia without mentioning the fact that Infogalactic already exists. Fortunately, someone in the comments rectified that failure; good work, Squidz Mackenzie. Keep in mind that if just one percent of the people who have publicly complained about Wikipedia bias simply joined the Burn Unit and edited Infogalactic three times per month, we’d already be threatening Wikipedia’s information supremacy.

Now, it will happen eventually. We are making constant progress and are gradually chipping away at it. But that progress is happening much more slowly than it could if conservatives would stop wasting so much time trying to improve the enemy.

No spirit of liberty

Peter Hitchens laments the fifth straight mindless rush to war on false pretenses by the British government and media:

Is THIS a warning? In the past few days I have begun to sense a dangerous and dark new intolerance in the air, which I have never experienced before. An unbidden instinct tells me to be careful what I say or write, in case it ends badly for me. How badly? That is the trouble. I am genuinely unsure.

I have been to many countries where free speech is dangerous. But I have always assumed that there was no real risk here.

Now, several nasty trends have come together. The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, both by politicians and many in the media, for doing what he is paid for and leading the Opposition, seems to me to be downright shocking.

I disagree with Mr Corbyn about many things and actively loathe the way he has sucked up to Sinn Fein. But he has a better record on foreign policy than almost anyone in Parliament. Above all, when so many MPs scuttled obediently into the lobbies to vote for the Iraq War, he held his ground against it and was vindicated.

Mr Corbyn has earned the right to be listened to, and those who now try to smear him are not just doing something morally wrong. They are hurting the country. Look at our repeated rushes into foolish conflict in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. All have done us lasting damage.

Everyone I meet now thinks they were against the Iraq War (I know most of them weren’t, but never mind). So that’s over. But Libya remains an unacknowledged disgrace. David Cameron has not suffered for it, and those who cheered it on have yet to admit they were mistaken….

I sense an even deeper and more thoughtless frenzy over Russia, a country many seem to enjoy loathing because they know so little about it.

I have already been accused, on a public stage, of justifying Moscow’s crime in Salisbury. This false charge was the penalty I paid for trying to explain the historical and political background to these events. I wonder if the bitterness also has something to do with the extraordinarily deep division over the EU, which has made opponents into enemies in a way not seen since the Suez Crisis.

In any case, the crude accusation, with its implication of treachery, frightened me. I expect, as time goes by, I will be accused of being an ‘appeaser’ and of being against ‘British values’. And then what? An apparatus of thought policing is already in place in this country. By foolishly accepting bans on Muslim ‘extremists’, we have licensed public bodies to decide that other views, too, are ‘extremist’.

Britain desperately needs a Brexit party that will pursue British First policies rather than obediently falling into line with the neocons, who play the same role in the Conservative Party and Nu Labour wing that they do in the Republican Party and Clinton Democrat wing.

The remarkable thing about both Britain and the USA is the way so many of their citizens are willing to take arms, fight, and die in wars against neutrals of no interest to their nations while never raising a voice, let alone a finger, against the Invade the World, Invite the World internal enemies who are, at the very least, threatening the survival of both nations through immigration and war.