Author: VD

30,000 infiltrators

Both the math and the social mood is less than promising:

Hungary and Slovakia have been vilified by many for rebelling against
taking in thousands of refugees. Not only have they rejected European
Union-imposed quotas, but both countries have made it clear that a mass
Muslim migration would pose unacceptable demographic and cultural
challenges. Their concerns are well founded, not only over integration
but especially from a security perspective.

Lebanon’s education
minister, Elias Bousaab, warned recently that two in every 100 Syrian
migrants arriving in Europe are Islamic State fighters, sent to
infiltrate a continent distracted by sympathy. If Bousaab’s conservative
calculation proves accurate, it would mean that among the 10,000 Syrian
refugees that Secretary of State John F. Kerry has pledged to allow
into the United States in 2016, there could be 200 committed terrorists.

Germany is now expecting 1.5 million migrants. If the Lebanese estimate holds, that means there will be 30,000 Islamic State fighters resident in Germany by the end of the year. Now, granted, most of the “Syrian refugees” are not even Syrian, but then, we have no assurance that the Pakistani, Afghani, and Yemeni migrants are any less likely to sympathize with ISIS than their Syrian cohorts.

There is nothing any of us can do about any of this except watch, wait, and understand that when the native populations begin taking measures that go well beyond the infiltrators, they are not the parties responsible for the inevitable tragedies. The responsible parties are those who made the invasions possible in the first place.

I can’t possibly do justice to how angry people are here. I mean, I quite literally can’t post what I am hearing people of all ages, of all political identities, saying about the invaders and their own politicians, or as doing so would be in violation of numerous speech laws, including those of the USA.

Linux SJW assault turned back

Led by the meritocratic example of Linus Torvalds, the Linux development community successfully defeated an attempt by an SJW entryst to impose “civility and professionalism” i.e. a weaponized code of conduct, on the community:

A prominent Linux kernel developer announced today in a blog post that she would step down from her direct work in the kernel community, saying that the community values blunt honesty, often containing profane and personal attacks above “basic human decency.”

Sarah Sharp, an Intel employee who until recently was the maintainer of the USB 3.0 host controller driver, wrote that she could no longer work within a developer culture that required overworked maintainers to be rude and brusque in order to get the job done. She continues to work on other open-source software projects, but says that she has begun to dread even minor interaction with the kernel community….

Sharp has publicly locked horns with senior Linux kernel developers including Torvalds in the past over issues of civility and professionalism, and has, arguably, been more responsible than anyone else for pressing the community to consider those issues more critically in recent years.

But even relatively minor moves to curb bad behavior have met with angry resistance from some kernel devs – a meekly worded “please be respectful” policy adopted as a kernel patch earlier this year provoked furious commentary on mailing lists and Reddit discussions, even if Torvalds himself lent the policy some cursory support.

Good riddance. That is exactly what a successful anti-SJW defense looks like. If the entryist is whining and crying and angrily decrying the mean antediluvian neanderthals who won’t cater to her feelings, you can be sure that the community she is attacking – and which she only cared about insofar as she could attempt to control it – did the right thing by refusing to give in to her.

This is good news for Linux, as the flipside of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence suggests that those organizations that resist social justice incursions will be considerably more likely to remain focused on their primary functions.

Fair play for FATCA

It looks like the Law of Unintended Consequences is about to strike the US federal government again:

This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will announce its final package of measures under its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project that would enable foreign governments to tax overseas earnings of American companies. If the United States fails to make changes of our own before that plan begins being enacted next year, this effort, which The Wall Street Journal called “a global revenue grab,” will ensure much of these American earnings stay overseas permanently.

Considering that the US government claims the right to force foreign banks to track and report its citizens, it’s not going to have much of a leg to stand on when foreign governments start claiming the right to tax the earnings of US corporations with bank accounts in their countries.

This is why it is so reprehensibly stupid for the US to insist on intervening in sovereign lands; by doing so it sacrifices its own claims to sovereignty. It is unlikely that Putin would have intervened in Syria if the US had not intervened in Ukraine and Syria. This foreign cash grab probably would not have been successful without FATCA.

Battle under the sea

Still think they’re not invaders?

Invading migrants who stormed the Channel Tunnel in a desperate bid to break into Britain by force managed to get ten miles before they were caught, it has emerged.

A group of around 110 migrants, thought to be from Sudan and Eritrea, broke down security fences, pelted police with stones then made a dash for the tunnel in the early hours of Saturday morning.

They were eventually stopped by French gendarmes, who were able to stop the group by force in a battle some 250ft below the sea.

Let’s see. They broke through the border defenses, attacked the border guards with weapons, then were stopped by violence. Sounds like an invasion to me. Sure, they’re not wearing uniforms; does that mean the Zulu War and the Boer War weren’t wars either?

Meanwhile, in Germany, the government has admitted that they are expecting 1.5 million migrants this year, nearly twice as many as they previously reported. They seem surprisingly unconcerned, perhaps because past German governments have demonstrated their ability to deal with four times that number.

They should have started with him

Ben Bernanke says financial executives should have been arrested and charged with crimes:

With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on
Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what
went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more
corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The
Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on
indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, “but it
would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual
action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was
done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.”

He also offers a
detailed rebuttal to critics who argue the government could and should
have done more to rescue Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in the worst
weekend of a tumultuous time. “We were very, very determined not to let
it collapse,” he says. “But we were out of bullets at that point.”

Still,
he does acknowledge some missteps by the Fed. Analysts were slow to
realize just how serious the economic downturn would become, and he
faults himself for not doing more to explain to Americans why it was in
their interests to rescue the financial firms that had helped cause it.

Needless to say, I will be reading and reviewing this book in the near future. And I will be very, very, very surprised if Mr. Bernanke manages to convince me that he is doing anything except whitewash his record. The idea that it was essential to rescue the financial firms that are still preying on the American economy and weighing it down is simply nonsensical. The Federal Reserve didn’t succeed in anything except kicking the can down the road and ensure that the next crisis will be even more severe.

Not slutty enough

Who would have ever thought we would see the day that Nero was deemed insufficiently sluttish?

Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was ejected from the Amber Rose Slut Walk in Los Angeles this afternoon. Slut Walkers could be heard yelling to police officers, “Thanks for taking out the trash!”‎

Yiannopoulos was reporting from the event with a film crew, interviewing Rebel Media broadcaster and Canadian libertarian politician Lauren Southern about the feminist movement which protests against “rape culture” and “slut-shaming.”
‎
Southern had just asked host Amber Rose whether she believed in rape culture. Event organizers immediately announced to Breitbart that they were calling law enforcement to have both journalists escorted from Pershing Square in downtown LA.

Protesters snatched and tore up Yiannopoulos’s placard, which read: “‘Rape Culture And Harry Potter’: Both Fantasy” in view of the police, who stood by while protesters bellowed and grabbed at a second placard that read, “Regret is not Rape.”‎

I have no doubt that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice will be all over this outrageous violation of a gay man’s civil rights.

Stepping up the war on ISIS

The US State Department was complaining that Russia wasn’t really hitting ISIS. It will be interesting to see what they will cry about next now that the Russian air force has increased its efforts:

Those of a skeptical persuasion have been inclined to suggest that
perhaps the US isn’t fully committed to the fight. Explanations for that
suggestion range from the mainstream (the White House is loathe to get
the US into another Mid-East war) to the “conspiratorial” (the CIA
created ISIS and thus doesn’t want to destroy the group due to its value
as a strategic asset).
The implication in all of this is that a modern army that was truly
determined to destroy the group could likely do so in a matter of months
if not weeks and so once Russia began flying sorties from Latakia, the
world was anxious to see just how long the various rebel groups
operating in Syria could hold up under bombardment by the Russian air
force.

The answer, apparently, is “less than a week.”

On Saturday, the Russian Ministry of Defense said it has conducted 60 bombing runs in 72 hours, hitting more than 50 ISIS targets. According to the ministry, Islamic State fighters are in a state of “panic” and more than 600 have deserted.

Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. But regardless, it’s clear that Russia isn’t playing around. And with Iran poised to send ground troops into Syria, it increasingly looks like the Obama administration and the neocons are likely to get an epic lesson in the unintended consequences of hubris.

Denying supply and demand

The US Employment-Population Ratio and Labor Force Participation Rate continue to fall:

A record 94,610,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month — an increase of 579,000 from August — and the labor force participation rate reached its lowest point in 38 years, with 62.4 percent of the U.S. population either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The EPR is down to 59.2 percent. Imagine how many of those 94.6 million Americans could find jobs, and how much their wages would rise, if the 59 million post-1965 immigrants were repatriated.

Mea culpa

Apparently one of my game design innovations is a “trend that needs to die“, as far as The Escapist is concerned:

Escort missions

Is there anything more annoying than an escort mission? You have to make sure that one NPC get from point A to point B, and you have to make sure they get there alive. Almost invariably, the NPC gets himself into trouble. Maybe he walks too slow and you’re constantly waiting on him, or he walks too fast, plunging into danger before you clear the way. Sometimes they take a path all their own, and it’s never the shortest one to your destination. In a similar vein, let’s do away with Assassin’s Creed’s eavesdropping missions as well, since they’re just escort missions wearing a Halloween disguise.

Yes, believe it or not, Rebel Moon Rising was publicly recognized by Computer Gaming World for being the first shooter to introduce escort missions. The issues the writer mentions are all legitimate, but they were obvious from the start and I believe we handled them pretty well. Other designers would not have followed in our footsteps if it hadn’t worked, but it seems not all of them have been as successful in addressing them.

Of course, the pathing is considerably easier in a 2.5D game than a 3D one, although I don’t know why escorted NPCs wouldn’t have an optimal path pre-programmed into them in the first place.

What I find a bigger problem with the escort mission is the way in which the story situation is so often handled ineptly. That first escort mission in RMR involved escorting baby aliens, who naturally wouldn’t know to run or to defend themselves if attacked by soldiers with lasers. But escort missions where armed adult warriors don’t defend themselves or even run away when attacked are just poorly designed, so it shouldn’t be a surprise if there are other problems with the implementation.