Author: VD

Target goes full-tranny

If you’re opposed to the latest SJW Narrative, take Target off your list:

The Target department store chain has jumped into the transgender bathroom debate by declaring that men who claim to be women may use whatever bathroom or changing room they choose.

“Inclusivity is a core belief at Target,” a new company statement reads. “It’s something we celebrate. We stand for equality and equity, and strive to make our guests and team members feel accepted, respected and welcomed in our stores and workplaces every day.”

The retailer added, “We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”

“Everyone deserves to feel like they belong,” the statement concluded. “You’ll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target.”

Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder added that the policy statement is a public confirmation of its longstanding policy. “It’s just us being very overt in stating it,” she said.

Customers and potential customers almost immediately spoke out against Target’s decision to ignore the biological difference between men and women.

The thing is, there is nothing wrong with unisex bathrooms. In Japan, for example, many of the bathrooms are unisex because space is at a premium and there is only room for one bathroom in many establishments.

But we’re not seeing the elimination of sex-segregated bathrooms, we’re seeing the demonic “five lights” strategy, forcing people to submit to the Narrative and admit to something they know to be untrue.

All ur hashtag are belong to us

The Global Warming charlatans are planning a propaganda push. This is from a science activist mailing list.

Climate Feedback works like this: Using the new web-annotation platform Hypothesis, scientists verify facts and annotate online climate articles, layering their insights and comments on top of the original story. They then issue a “5-star” rating so readers can quickly judge stories’ scientific credibility. Recognized by NASA, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and California Gov. Jerry Brown among others, Climate Feedback is already improving journalistic standards by flagging misreported climate science in mainstream outlets; earlier this month, for example, scientists took apart Bjorn Lomborg’s misleading op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. This is only a hint of what Climate Feedback has in store as it begins to aggregate those credibility scores into a wider index, rating major news sources on their reporting of climate change as part of a new Scientific Trust Tracker.

To that end, Climate Feedback is launching a crowd funding campaign on April 27 around the hashtag #StandWithScience, supported by leading climate minds like Profs. Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes and others. I invite you to take a look at this sneak preview of our campaign (NOTE: please do not share publicly before April 27). The Exxon climate scandal has already made its way into the 2016 election season, but few have discussed the role the media has played enabling corporate interests to sow doubt about the science of climate change, which has long confused the public and undermined political support for dealing with the issue. As 350.org founder Bill McKibben said of Climate Feedback: Scientists are just about ready to come out of the lab and get more active and when they do, it will make a remarkable difference.

Let’s disrupt it. VFM, you know what to do. Political activism is not science. #StandWithScience.

Intel and labor mobility

Two points concerning labor mobility.

  •  Intel will lay off 11% of its global workforce, up to 12,000 employees, a painful downsizing aimed at accelerating its shift away from the waning PC market to one more focused on cloud computing and connected devices. In an email to employees, CEO Brian Krzanich said that after the restructuring, “I am confident that we’ll emerge as a more productive company with broader reach and sharper execution.” Intel CFO Stacy Smith said that half the workforce reduction, 6,000 people, will be accomplished by the end of this year.
  • Intel Corporation has filed 6147 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 4238 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2013 to 2015. Intel was ranked 14 among all visa sponsors. Please note that 602 LCA for H1B Visa and 689 LC for green card have been denied or withdrawn during the same period. Intel had filed 8065 LCA and 3423 LC from fiscal year 2001 to 2010

Interesting how those numbers are so similar, is it not? It would be informative to know how many of the 12,000 are in the USA.

Star Citizen: the final nail

Derek Smart explains why he believes Chris Roberts’s statement about a “minimum viable product” is an extinction level event:

WHY I BELIEVE THIS TO BE THE FINAL NAIL IN THE STAR CITIZEN COFFIN.

None
of the arguments people are making are relevant. And White Knights,
Shitizens, and Shillizens are doing what they always do: obfuscate,
attack, confuse, distort.

These are what’s relevant; all the points from my latest blog.

1)
The game he originally pitched simply cannot be built once he increased
the scope. Period. All the features already cut out, are evidence of
this.
2) The CryEngine which he chose to build the game with, is
simply not capable of building it. And yes, even though they now have a
custom version of it, that’s more about re-inventing the wheel, than it
is about making sure the wheel is still round. The latter being the
basis of using a core engine from which a custom engine is derived.
3) Following my first July 2015 blog in which I made the statements I said as:

“Without
disrespect to anyone, I’m just going to say it: it is my opinion that,
this game, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever. There
isn’t a single publisher or developer on this planet who could build
this game as pitched, let alone for anything less than $150 million. The original vision which I backed in 2012? Yes, that was totally doable. This new vision? Not a chance.
The technical scope of this game surpasses GTAV, not to mention the likes of Halo. Do you have any idea what those games cost to make and how long they took? Do
you know how many games which cost $50 million to make took almost five
years to release? And they were nowhere in scope as Star Citizen?“

He wrote an entire missive and said this:

“You
all know that already; you’ve lived that. You’ve seen Star Citizen
evolve and start to come together. You’ve watched our atoms form
molecules, our modules form a real, playable game (that you can boot up
and play today!). There are people out there who are going to tell you
that this is all a BAD THING. That it’s ‘feature creep’ and we should
make a smaller, less impressive game for the sake of having it out more
quickly or in order to meet artificial deadlines. Now I’ll answer those
claims in one word: Bullshit!
Star Citizen matters
BECAUSE it is big, because it is a bold dream. It is something everyone
else is scared to try. You didn’t back Star Citizen because you want
what you’ve seen before. You’re here and reading this because we are
willing to go big, to do the things that terrify publishers. You’ve
trusted us with your money so we can build a game, not line our pockets.
And we sure as hell didn’t run this campaign so we could put that money
in the bank, guarantee ourselves a profit and turn out some flimsy
replica of a game I’ve made before. You went all in supporting us and
we’ve gone all in making the game. Is Star Citizen today a bigger goal
than I imagined in 2012? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely
not: it’s the whole damn point.“

As with all his
previous statements and promises, you can flush this one down the
toilet too. Chris evolved to be more of a salesman, than a game
developer/designer. And a patently dishonest one.
How coincidental is it that – again – shortly after my latest blog dropped, and which I said this:

“And
as I have stated before, Chris being a dreamer, I don’t believe that he
set out to scam gamers. However, the only right thing that he can do
now is to come clean, explain to the backers what he can and cannot do,
what went wrong and how, provide the financials to the backers who are
entitled to it, and stop taking money for a project he knows all too
well that he simply cannot deliver as originally promised.”

He does this latest 104TC in which he reveals that the short-term goal is to deliver a MVP.

“So,
really what we’re doing with Star Citizen is we’re working on the game,
adding features for an incredibly ambitious design – I don’t think
there is any other game that is trying to do as much as we’re trying to
do.  So, degree of difficulty 11, not 10.  And, we’ll have what we
determine is a minimum viable product feature list for what you would
call Star Citizen the commercial release which is basically when you
say, “Okay, we’ve gotten to this point and we’ve still got plans to add a
lot more cool stuff and more content and more functionality and more
features…” – Which by the way includes some of the later stretch goals
we have because not all of that is going to be for ‘absolutely right
here’ on the commercial release.  But we’ll have something that we’ll
think, ‘Okay yeah, not everyone can play it but it doesn’t matter – you
can load it up, it plays really well, it’s really stable, there’s lots
of content, there’s lots of fun things to do, different professions,
lots of places to go, we’ve got a really good ecosystem.’  So, when we
get to that point that’s when we would say, “Now it’s not alpha, it’s
not beta, it’s Star Citizen 1.0.”

We spent two hours discussing this at Brainstorm a few months ago, and considering the way in which Derek managed to impress even his most inveterate skeptics and haters with his expertise and technical observations during that session, I see absolutely no reason to doubt him now.

Cruz curb-stomped in New York

60.5 Trump
24.8 Kasich
14.7 Cruz

From the Decision Desk results, it looks as if Trump will take as many as 94 of the 95 delegates. So, obviously, the most important consequence is that it puts Trump back on track to win the 1,237 delegates he needs.

But the primary result also makes clear that Cruz is not a serious national candidate. No one who has observed the way he is attempting to lawyer himself into the nomination while getting repeatedly destroyed at the polls can possibly conclude that he is a viable Republican nominee, considering how he can’t win in either the more liberal northeastern states or more conservative southern ones.

His core constituency appears to be cuckservatives in states with sufficiently low immigration who are still unaware of the realities of the great issue of our day.

New York primary

“New York will award 95 delegates on the GOP side, and 247 on the
Democratic. If Trump wins by one vote over 50 percent, both statewide
and in every congressional district, he will take all 95 delegates.”

Trump needs a big performance here to regain his momentum. This is an open thread to discuss the New York primary.

A Quest for Depression in the Butt

This is just too freaking funny. From File 770:

If anyone wonders what side of the cultural divide that Chuck Tingle, author of Rapid Puppy pick “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” , falls on, he’s having Zoe Quinn, Gamergate patient zero, make his video game.

Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I very much doubt any of these SJWs have ever actually seen Depression Quest. It should be absolutely fascinating to see what Locke Valentine does with Mr. Tingle’s inimitable oeuvre, given her almost unbelievably limited skill set.

The Last Days of Cuckservatism

The New American reviews Cuckservative:

Cuckservative is co-written by Vox Day and John Red Eagle. Vox Day is the pseu­donym of a video game designer who has amassed quite a following in the online world with his often-controversial views. Day’s high IQ and technical approach to problem solving is felt throughout Cuckservative. Much effort is given to making the book’s main argument that immigration is the most important issue of our day and that “cuckservatives” are on the wrong side. “Thanks to their cuckservative ideology, America’s self-styled conservatives have literally betrayed the entire purpose of the Constitution of the United States, and in doing so, they have put the very survival of the nation at risk,” the authors charge.

Reading the book, one might easily feel reminded of two earlier books by Pat Buchanan: Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, and State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. The first book detailed the neoconservative infiltration of the conservative movement, and the latter detailed the demographic destruction caused by our immigration policy. Day, much like Buchanan before him, takes the GOP and the conservative establishment to task, but Day comes at it with an almost scientific approach. Cuckservative recounts how, almost from the beginning, the conservative movement was all too willing to purge elements that it feared might hurt its respectability in the eyes of its opponents. These “purges,” which have continued throughout all of the conservative movement’s history even to this day, “indicated a cowardly and submissive willingness to surrender when faced with public criticism.”

The vast majority of the book makes arguments against open immigration and goes into detail on the errors of the pro-immigration arguments espoused by the cuckservatives in the conservative movement. As the book explains, open immigration has been and will continue to be disastrous for anyone looking to secure political victories for the Right. The cuckservatives fail to realize this and routinely label any opponents of open borders and amnesty as “racist” or “xenophobes.” As a matter of fact, the book explains, “Today’s cuckservatives appear to be in a competition with the left to see who can open the borders wider, provide amnesty for more aliens, and add greater incentives for immigrants to retain their own culture in the place of American traditions and values.”

The cuckservative view on immigration is dismantled across multiple chapters. The “Melting Pot” is exposed as a myth. The idea that immigrants from nations with historically leftist governments will somehow miraculously become limited-government Republicans is ridiculed as the “Magic Dirt Theory.” Cuckservative explains that the “extremely high preference for expansive government among Hispanic immigrants is consistent with traditions of government in Latin America since the days of the Spanish Empire.”

These concerns are not just limited to the political realm for, as Cuckservative explains, “import people and you import their culture.” The discussions in the book are especially timely considering the refugee crisis currently unfolding in Europe.

Reading the comments of some of the commenters over there, I can’t help but think some of them don’t so much need to read Cuckservative as they desperately need to read SJWAL.

If you still think that a civil debate where the facts are thoughtfully articulated and the other side’s arguments are humbly but keenly dismantled, you’re not only wrong, you’re 2,400 years behind the times.

Steve Keen educates a Nobel laureate

The inability to account for debt and the total failure to understand the relationship between banks and loan creation are two of the reason mainstream economics is so hapless with regards to producing functional models. The world’s most important economist explains that his professional colleagues are simply ignoring one of capitalism’s most pressing problems:

I like Joe Stiglitz, both professionally and personally. His Globalization and its Discontents was virtually the only work by a Nobel Laureate economist that I cited favourably in my Debunking Economics, because he had the courage to challenge the professional orthodoxy on the “Washington Consensus”. Far more than most in the economics mainstream—like Ken Rogoff for example—Joe is capable of thinking outside its box.

But Joe’s latest public contribution—“The Great Malaise Continues” on Project Syndicate—simply echoes the mainstream on a crucial point that explains why the US economy is at stall speed, which the mainstream simply doesn’t get.

Joe correctly notes that “the world faces a deficiency of aggregate demand”, and attributes this to both “growing inequality and a mindless wave of fiscal austerity”, neither of which I dispute. But then he adds that part of the problem is that “our banks … are not fit to fulfill their purpose” because “they have failed in their essential function of intermediation”:

    Between long-term savers (for example, sovereign wealth funds and those saving for retirement) and long-term investment in infrastructure stands our short-sighted and dysfunctional financial sector…

    Former US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke once said that the world is suffering from a “savings glut.” That might have been the case had the best use of the world’s savings been investing in shoddy homes in the Nevada desert. But in the real world, there is a shortage of funds; even projects with high social returns often can’t get financing.

I’m the last one to defend banks, but here Joe is quite wrong: the banks have very good reasons not to “fulfill their purpose” today, because that purpose is not what Joe thinks it is. Banks don’t “intermediate loans”, they “originate loans”, and they have every reason not to originate right now.

In effect, Joe is complaining that banks aren’t doing what economics textbooks say they should do. But those textbooks are profoundly wrong about the actual functioning of banks, and until the economics profession gets its head around this and why it matters, then the economy will be stuck in the Great Malaise that Joe is hoping to lift us out of.

The argument that banks merely intermediate between savers and investors leads the mainstream to a manifestly false conclusion: that the level of private debt today is too low, because too little private debt is being created right now. In reality, the level of private debt is way too high, and that’s why so little lending is occurring.

I don’t agree with Keen on everything, but he is the most important, most revolutionary economist in the world today. And he is dead-on with regards to both the problem of private debt as well as the way in which banks originate, not only loans, but credit money itself.

Brainstorm: the courses

In light of the numerous requests that have been made concerning an expansion of the Brainstorm concept into subjects beyond game development, we are expanding it to include actual online courses, complete with tests, grades, and achievement badges, for those who are interested in continuing their educations. These courses are not accredited in any way, shape, or form, as they are solely concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and the deepening of understanding rather than academic credentials.

Although it may not be the first course we actually schedule, the lead course will be ASTRONOMY with Dr. Sarah Salviander. Dr. Salviander is no stranger to many on this blog, although not everyone may know that she is a noted astrophysicist whose specialty is black holes. While most of her publications, such as Fe II Emission in Active Galactic Nuclei: The Role of Total and Gas-Phase Iron Abundance and Accretion Disk Temperatures of QSOs: Constraints from the Emission Lines are completely beyond, well, pretty much everyone here, including me, she is the author of Castalia House’s Astronomy & Astrophysics homeschool curriculum and is eminently qualified to teach the Astronomy course as a subject matter expert. The course will consist of 10 weekly lectures and will cost $200. Brainstorm members will receive a 50 percent discount. A date has not yet been established, but it will take place in the fall.

The other course is one that has long been in the making, but finally came together when I put together a homeschool curriculum for my own kids. ECONOMICS with Vox Day will consist of 10 biweekly lectures, will cost $100, and will be free for all Brainstorm members. I’m still sorting out the details of when it will begin, as I have to schedule it around the next GameDev course that will begin on May 21st, but it will definitely be this year. We also expect to announce other courses with other subject matter experts in the near future.

If you are seriously interested in taking either course, please indicate as much in the comments. And if this incentivizes you to sign up for Brainstorm, you can do so here. Speaking of Brainstorm, there will be a closed session on Saturday, the 23rd, at 7 PM Eastern, and an open Hugo Awards Nomination Party at 12:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday, the 26th, whenever the announcements take place.
 Invitations for the former will be sent out tonight and a registration link for the latter will be provide a day or two before the event.