Author: VD

Dude, It Was YOUR Vaccine!

The irony of Donald Trump lamenting the death of Lynette Hardaway, aka Diamond, by Suddenly at the age of 51.

Really bad news for Republicans and frankly, ALL Americans. Our beautiful Diamond, of Diamond and Silk, has just passed away at her home in the State she loved so much, North Carolina. Silk was with her ail the way, and at her passing. There was no better TEAM anywhere, or at any time! Diamond’s death was totally unexpected, probably her big and precious HEART just plain gave out. Rest In Peace our Magnificent Diamond, you will be greatly missed!

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Germany Implodes

The economic engine of Europe is rapidly approaching crisis and economics depression:

The real estate sector in Germany dropped in the last three months of 2022 due to the surging costs of financing and to record inflation in Europe’s largest economy, a report published on Monday by BNP Paribas showed.

Investments in the country’s commercial property sector slumped by 50% from October to December, compared to the five-year average for the period, and reached just €9.9 billion ($10.6 billion).

The sector took a strong hit as investors shied away from deals due to rising interest rates and an overall worsening economic environment in Germany, the survey results revealed.

One of the fascinating things about Clown World is the way that it simultaneously manages to destroy economies while placing a nominal emphasis on economic growth uber alles. The collapse of the Germany economy should be followed, in relatively short order, by the collapse of the European Union.

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Evil Wizards

They destroy what they cannot control to their liking:

For the last 12 years, my company Autarch has published my game Adventurer Conqueror King System under the terms of the Open Game License (OGL) 1.0. For the last 5 years, ACKS has been my full-time job.

Now, Wizards of the Coast, in what I can only describe as an act of perfidious treachery, has decided to retroactively deauthorize the OGL 1.0 and offer up a new Open Game License 1.1 to replace it.

What does this new license mean? Where do we go from here? Before we go further, please note that while I am a trained attorney (Harvard Law magna cum laude, in fact), I’m not a practicing intellectual property specialist. My thoughts should not be construed as legal advice about what you should do. These are just my thoughts about the situation Autarch has now found itself in, and what we need to do.

Can They Really Do That?!
When people learn that WOTC is deauthorizing the OGL, the first question they ask is “can they really do that?” It’s a fair question. After all, for more than 20 years we’ve all relied on the OGL to be irrevocable.

But the question isn’t whether they can do. They are doing it. Right now, on our watch. No, the question is “who is going to stop them from doing it?”

And the answer might be “no one.”

If you’re under the illusion that we live in a country with a court system that rewards the righteous, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. The American justice system is pay-to-play, and the amount you have to pay is unfathomable to those who haven’t gone through it. I consulted with one of New York’s top IP litigators last week to find out how much money I’d have to raise via GoFundMe to fight Wizards. When I asked him if $100,000 would be enough, he laughed. He said I’d need $500,000 to even have a chance of summary judgment, and $4 million for a trial. Wizards has a war chest measured in millions and will fight this out for 4-6 years.

Imagine if WOTC sued Autarch claiming that my game Ascendant was violating their copyright. Ascendant is a d100 superhero game that has nothing in common with D&D and uses no language from the SRD. WOTC would have legitimate claim whatsoever. If we had $4,000,000 to fight, we’d certainly win. But… we don’t have the money. So, we’d lose.

In real life courtroom dramas, the good guys don’t win. The rich guys win.

He’s not wrong. Even if you win, you’re probably not getting your legal fees paid by the losing side. This is a devastating blow to RPG game developers and marks the end of a golden age of game development.

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Foreigners Defend Fake Democracy

Clown World has obviously found a playbook it likes.

Two years ago our Capitol was attacked by fanatics, now we are watching it happen in Brazil.

Solidarity with Lula and the Brazilian people.

Democracies around the world must stand united to condemn this attack on democracy.

Bolsonaro should not be given refuge in Florida.

It would be more accurate to say that fake democracies around the world must stand united to condemn popular protests against stolen democracy.

These clowns are going to be in for a real surprise if they continue engaging in war against Russia. The only thing that is preventing the US Capitol – there is no “us”, Ilhan – half the cities on the East Coast from resembling Mariupol is that Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping don’t see a direct conflict with the US military as furthering their objectives yet.

But the time does appear to be drawing nigh, probably because the US think tanks, which are literally always wrong, asserts the US military will win a war over Taiwan with China due to their simulations.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report, titled ‘The First Battle of the Next War,’ estimates that the US would lose at least two aircraft carriers and that 3,200 American troops would be killed in three weeks of combat, according to CNN, which viewed an advanced copy.

The simulations were run 24 times. Taiwan survived as an autonomous entity in most scenarios, but with heavy losses to all parties. “The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members,” the report predicts.

China’s navy would be left “in shambles” and Beijing could lose 10,000 troops, 155 combat aircraft and 138 major ships.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s military would be “severely degraded” and left to defend an island “without electricity and basic services.” Japan could also lose approximately 100 aircraft and 26 warships as US bases on its territory come under attack from China.

Perhaps they’re right, for once, but I very much doubt it. I would be absolutely willing to bet that the variables utilized don’t even begin to account for all of the current supply and special forces shortages due to the active support being provided for Ukraine. The simulation obviously also didn’t include North Korea attacking South Korea to further dilute the US military’s resource once the invasion of Taiwan begins. This is likely an optimistic scenario which will be used to justify a) more money for the Navy, b) a draft, c) continued belligerence on the part of US foreign policy, and d) prevent the Taiwanese from striking a Hong Kong-style deal with the Xi administration.

The simulation report can be downloaded here. I’ll read it soon and review it on the Darkstream. Notice that the summary tends to confirm my prior expectations.

CSIS developed a wargame for a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan and ran it 24 times. In most scenarios, the United States/Taiwan/Japan defeated a conventional amphibious invasion by China and maintained an autonomous Taiwan. However, this defense came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers. Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years. China also lost heavily, and failure to occupy Taiwan might destabilize Chinese Communist Party rule. Victory is therefore not enough. The United States needs to strengthen deterrence immediately.

What I’d like to see is a simulation that accounts for China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all acting in concert. Because that is what I expect to see happen when WWIII expands and moves into a more active phase.

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Too Little, Too Stupid, Too Late

The Prometheans have belatedly realizing that they’re going to lose, and lose very badly, due to their decades-long war on masculinity in general and white men in particular. From the chans:

l’m a staffer for a major news network in Australia. We’ve been instructed by the government to begin a long term military recruitment campaign. We’re about 2-3 years away from a massive war. This campaign will be long and gradual.

Phase 0 was the never ending coverage of Ukraine.

Phase 1 will be a gradual increase in news of the weaponry our country has.

A lot of the intermediate phases seem mundane, but the whole process is to get as many men as possible comfortable and desensitized to war. The last phases will involve teaching women to be ashamed of and to shame non-military men. There will soon be ninja-warrior type of shows but in the military training theme. They’re going to try to make military sexy.

Basically, manipulate women to desire it, which pushes men to go into it.

Someone brought up the issue of “sites like 4chan”. Some old boomer said there will be teams dedicated for those kinds of websites.

Massive war = China takes Australia. If I was living in Australia, I would start studying Chinese.

Don’t fight for Clown World, no matter how Globohomo suddenly hides its rainbow flags and begins loudly proclaiming its love and patriotism for the very nations it has feverishly sought to destroy. The enemy within the West is far more pernicious, far more evil, and far more to be opposed than the purported enemy without.

And inoculate your sons against the lies they will be relentlessly told. Because the Empire of Lies is coming for them. Let Clown World’s sacred diversity defend it, if they can.

Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but they often constitute a weakness in two directions. First, their basic human nature often differs from that of the original imperial stock. If the earlier imperial race was stubborn and slow-moving, the immigrants might come from more emotional races, thereby introducing cracks and schisms into the national policies, even if all were equally loyal. Second, while the nation is still affluent, all the diverse races may appear equally loyal. But in an acute emergency, the immigrants will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.

Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb

The irony is that it is only the vaccinated young men who will be stupid and gullible enough to fall for the coming campaign.

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Is Elon Lying Again?

We know from first-hand experience that Elon Musk lied about permitting banned individuals to return to Twitter. So it wouldn’t be too terribly surprising if CDAN is correct and he is also failing to tell the truth about eradicating child porn from the platform.

Shortly after the celebrity CEO took over the bird site, the CEO enlisted many online influencers to boost lies about purported success at removing child porn from the site, most notably top hashtags used to advertise the stuff. I told you the celebrity CEO was lying, and that a major news organization was conducting a significant investigation exposing all of this. It was just recently published, and you should go and read it. Child porn has gotten worse on the bird site, not better, since the celebrity CEO took over.

The story is at NBC News. And while it’s worth noting that NBC doesn’t appear to have had any problem with the market in what it calls “child sexual abuse material” on Twitter until Musk bought it, that doesn’t change the fact that what he says is no longer on the platform is still on the platform.

Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.

“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.

But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

The tweets reviewed by NBC News offer to sell or trade content that is commonly known as child pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tweets do not show CSAM, and NBC News did not view any CSAM in the course of reporting this article.

Some tweets and accounts have been up for months and predate Musk’s takeover. They remained live on the platform as of Friday morning.

Then again, it’s possible that this is just a whack-a-mole problem that is in the process of being resolved. The question is whether Musk has actually given meaningful orders to his employees to get the job done and they’re dragging their feet or if he’s merely acting as his own PR and marketing departments. But given our success in establishing and implementing SG’s Clean Speech policy, and the ease with which spam bots can be detected and eradicated, there really isn’t any excuse for not eliminating the garbage from the platform.

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Weekend Arktoons

INVASION ’55 Episode 26: Road Kill

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 9: A Mirror of the Mind

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 45: Abandoned Halls

BEN GARRISON CLASSICS Episode 77: Hillary’s Wiki-Leak

ENTER: NIGHT Episode 12: Missing Person

THE RED TATTOO Episode 29: Imprisoned

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 177: Insta-Solve

THE SWORD OF GOD Episode 40: Scariest Thing Imaginable That’s All You Had to Say

FRIDAY FISH FUNNIES Episode 1: It All Adds Up

BOB Episode 102: New Year Plans

WARDOGS INC. Episode 16: I Have a Target

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 189: For Old Gang Sign

FULL OF EYES Episode 18: It Shall Be

Also today, Day by Day honors Arkhaven with an homage.

A Stalker’s Defense

One of the lead cyberstalkers of the homesteading couple’s YouTube channel tries to defend his harassment of them. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

This place only started because of the complete censorship of critical comments during the build process. No matter how nicely advice was couched, it resulted in the comment being deleted and the user being blocked. That arrogance was the Zeus from whose head this place sprang fully formed.

There were thousands of well-intentioned viewers that felt betrayed by this. They felt betrayed again when you suddenly and without warning announced that you were abandoning the off-grid premise of the channel and were in fact tying into the grid. The final betrayal came when you appeared to abandon the building process and disappear. All the views, all the ads, all the patreon money — it looked to a lot people like you took those things and ran. A great many people felt — truly felt — as if you had stolen their time and money. You never offered an explanation, and so viewers rightfully formed their own conclusions.

Our concerns about a child living in a house under construction were always genuine concerns. One only need skim your videos from that period to see the drywall dust, the failed inspections, the tools laying around everywhere, the lack of safety railing, etc. In my opinion, it was (and may still be) an thoroughly unsafe environment for a toddler.

You can practically smell the stink of Gamma floating off the page. How dare a content creator control the discourse on his own channel! How dare he not accept unsolicited, but nicely-couched advice offered to him!

And worst of all, how dare he change his plans!

This last observation, by the way, is why you should IMMEDIATELY jettison any Gamma you discover working for you or in your organization. They will never, ever, be successful at anything they do, no matter how small, because they have a near-complete inability to grasp the way in which that changing circumstances always requires changing course to attain or maintain success. The only way Gammas can be “successful” is to have it given to them by someone in a position to do so. This is why they are such shameless suck-ups as well as why they rage when their “I’m your biggest fan” routine doesn’t translate into anything of material advantage to them.

“You have to give me the prize because I really, really want it,” is an effective summary of the core Gamma philosophy across every walk of life, from business to romance.

The inability to adjust to changing circumstances is why “but you said” is a reliable Gamma tell. As well as “betrayal”, “well-intentioned”, “truly felt”, “rightfully”, and “genuine concerns”. It’s all just rhetorical cover meant to excuse their lunatic obsessions, but no psychologically well-adjusted individual is ever going to fall for it, because the claimed objectives never come close to justifying the excessive means utilized.

You’d think this guy would be happy, because the channel he was attacking went dark for a long time and the attempt to build the house appears to have failed, but Gamma psychology is so dysfunctional that not even normal schadenfreude can satisfy it.

This commenter’s reaction to the gamma’s attempted defense of his actions fairly well represents the normal individual’s view of the gammastalker and his “well-intentioned” behavior.

You ‘felt betrayed’? Seriously? What kind of parasocial dysfunctional idiots are you people? I don’t care how many comments were deleted, the content of those comments or what they changed their minds about with the build…the fact that you people took it so personally to start doxxing and stalking them is laughable and the fact that some of you brought their child into this is downright reprehensible. Youtubers are NOT your personal friends. Youtubers don’t owe you a god damn thing. They put out the content and you vote for the quality of that content with your views and your wallet. If you don’t like the content or personalities of the Youtuber, STOP watching.

They’re Gammas. That’s the fundamental problem. Because Gammas are always and inevitably going to Gamma.

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The Troll Hunter’s Guide

It’s come to my attention that an increasing number of YouTube creators and other Internet figures are being actively harassed online. Here is a list of things required for a successful troll hunt for anyone who wishes to build a criminal case against their cyberstalkers. It’s based on my own experience tracking down an individual who was stalking a number of people, including a young family who had recently lost a child.

  1. Stay calm. The troll’s primary objective is to upset you. Trolls feed off attention and negative emotion, so it’s important to control your own reactions and deny them both. Staying calm serves two positive purposes, as it prevents you from establishing an emotional relationship with them as well as forcing them to increase their efforts in order to achieve the desired effect, thereby increasing the likelihood they will make a mistake or cross a line.
  2. Be patient. A security expert has told me that no one can regularly comment without giving away their true identity within one year. Remember, the troll is in it for the attention, so hiding even the smallest significant aspects of his identity places him fundamentally at conflict with his own instincts and desires.
  3. Directly inform the troll that he is banned from visiting your site and from commenting under all current and future identities, and that if he persists in his activity, he is engaged in illegal trespassing and cyberstalking. It is vital to put them on notice. For some reason, many people who are capable of understanding that physical trespassing is not only illegal, but can permit them to be legally shot in some places tend to find it hard to grasp that online trespassing is illegal. The fact that you CAN access a site does not automatically give you permission to do so any more than the fact that you CAN physically access someone’s lawn gives you permission to walk on it.
  4. Don’t delete the troll’s comments. It took me a long time to learn this; even though I saved them in a separate text file, I sometimes got lazy or couldn’t be bothered. It’s best to have them there, in the blog, where they can be easily produced as evidence or mined for investigative purposes.
  5. Don’t permit the readers to engage with the troll. They may mean well, but their reactions to the troll are usually a bigger problem than the troll’s comments are. Set a policy of “Comments responding to a troll will be deleted” and delete them on sight. Commenters cannot shut down a troll because he seeks their negative attention; them saying “shut up” and “go away” is something he desires, so their effort on your behalf are counterproductive. Don’t let them feed him.
  6. Look for the troll’s other identities. Trolls always have sockpuppets, and often they are less careful when using them. Yama had over 30. Even a cursory glance at the mined comments shows that NTA has at least three. And often, the sockpuppet identity is the troll’s primary identity on other sites. Yama did not use Yama here at all, he primarily used Will leFey, Dan Picaro, Luscinia, and Alauda. But once I was able to link him to the Yamamanama and Yama the Spacefish identities, I was able to learn considerably more information about him and those around him.

Read the rest of it on the original post. We could certainly add more to it now, in light of subsequent experiences as well as changes in the legal systems of a number of jurisdictions and the lessons learned from various forays into arbitration and court. But it will do for a start.

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